Newport Harbor entrance in line for a dredge and repair

The entrance to Newport Harbor is due for a dredge and jetty repair this winter.

The city of Newport Beach will work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reinforce the nearly century-old concrete-and-rock jetty on the eastern, or Corona del Mar, side of the harbor entrance and scoop out enough accumulated sediment in the entrance channel to make the waterway 20 feet deep. The project should cost about $3 million.

City public works manager Chris Miller, who oversees infrastructure projects in the harbor, said the work to repair chipped concrete is relatively easy but there’s a lot of it, covering a work area about 700 feet long and 12 feet wide with a 15-foot footing, from the base seaward. The large rocks armoring the breakwater will also be replenished, with stone trucked in from a quarry in Riverside County.

The tremendous force of the ocean, especially when it churns during heavy winter storms, can knock the stones loose, Miller said.

“They’re designed and engineered to resist movement as much as possible, and when [workers] place them, they don’t haphazardly place them. They try to interlock them,” he told the city Parks, Beaches & Recreation commission Tuesday during a presentation on the repairs. But “you can see the rocks have sloughed down.”

The entrance to Newport Harbor has been calmed by jetties since 1918, starting along the western side at the Wedge. The eastern jetty came along in the late 1920s to early 1930s, and both legs have been extended and repaired over the years, although the last documented repairs to the east side were in 1948, Miller said.

In addition to the jetty maintenance, crews will remove about 70,000 cubic yards of sand from the entrance channel floor and deposit it back into open ocean just outside the surf zone near Balboa Pier, allowing it to naturally return directly to the beach.

The project will go out to bid next week and work should begin in November, with an estimated completion in March.

Miller said any leftover money could be used to dredge farther north into the harbor’s main channel.

The entrance channel dredge is separate of a larger, more complicated and much more expensive anticipated dredge of the main harbor that has been in the works for years. That big dig would remove 17 times more silt, mostly in the western area of the harbor, and could cost $20 million to $23 million.

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