Up Against a Seawall, Surfrider Wins Big

While it may seem like a mundane topic, the erosion along California's cliffside shores has become a huge deal for homeowners and surfers. If you've ever surfed at a higher tide in Solana or any number of towns, you've no doubt felt the effects of refraction, as waves wash into the cliffs and bounce back out to sea, often ruining your wave. For homeowners it's a big deal too, because a lot of multimillion dollar properties are at risk. But beachgoers have a stake as well, because in places like Solana and Encinitas, there's very little high tide beach at all thanks to erosion.

A group of Solana Beach homeowners called the Beach and Bluff Conservancy wants to spend many millions to "rebuild" the beaches with "natural" looking bluffs backed by a concrete that resembles the beach sandstone and a layer of vegetation at the top of the hill. They would also use offshore structures like artificial reefs and underwater revetments to keep sand from "migrating" down the coast and away from the beach. However, Surfrider's folks don't think this plan will work, citing many failures for human engineered offshore structures, like El Segundo's Prattes Surf Reef, to work as planned. Nor does Surfrider think that the Conservancy can come up with anywhere nearly enough money to keep sand on the beaches.

"Solana Beach gets a million visitors a year," says Surfrider's Jim Jaffee. "Are we going to forever protect a few homes at the price of a million visitors a year?"

Jim Jaffee, an engineer with 16 years experience in coastal issues, wrote a paper that the San Diego judge used for her ruling. The paper calculated that if Solana Beach's project was approved, then it could result in a deficit of 385,000 cubic yards of sand, or 35 feet of beach. In parts of Solana of course, there is already no beach at all. So a net loss of sand is a big deal.

Surfrider and the Beach and Bluff Conservancy both agree that a big part of the problem with sand loss in California has come from inland development, that paves over creekbeds and streams that normally would supply sand from the hills and canyons to the beaches during rainy season. The other reason is dams, which hold vast amounts of future beach as silt behind their walls. The result of all this has been drastic erosion in places like San Diego, Santa Cruz, C-Street in Ventura and parts of Pacifica. The problem is, both groups vastly disagree on solutions.

Homeowners and engineers generally want to harden the shoreline to keep the ocean away. Surfrider and other environmental groups have begun to advocate a plan they call "managed retreat". This plan would allow a homeowner to keep a home for 20 to 50 years behind a "temporary" seawall, or behind a temporary wall of sand or riprap boulders. But such a plan would eventually recognize that the sea is going to claim the property. The property owner would either be compensated with a buyout of property or by getting a tax easement on the land. At the end of the period, the homeowner moves out, the seawall goes out, and nature takes its course, eroding a bluff and allowing for sand to fall onto the beach from the bluff. This is one of the natural processes that would normally keep sand along a beach. For some privaty property advocates, a plan like this is hard to take. But the alternative is shoreline armoring, hundreds of millions of dollars spent to pump sand onto beaches in a continually losing battle as more seawalls are built.