Sand disappears from tourist beaches in California – 9/3/2023 – World

In Oceanside, a coastal suburb north of San Diego, the palms sway and the temperature is almost always perfect. Fishermen cast their lines from the long wooden pier. Teenagers with salt-bleached hair watch the surfers.

“Every day here feels like the most perfect summer day,” says Mercedes Murray, 38, on Buccaneer Beach, a popular spot with locals. There’s just one problem: the sand is disappearing.

Where locals used to play beach volleyball in Buccaneer, there are now natural pebble mounds. Visitors who were previously able to spread out on large stretches of sand near the pier must compete for space on a narrow strip of rock.

A beach town cannot exist without a beach, and only about a third of the city’s 6 kilometers of coastline still has enough sand for people to enjoy. That’s a problem for a town that used to lure tourists with the slogan “tan your skin at Oceanside” and host several surfing competitions.

Local leaders are now racing to reinvent the coastline in hopes that Oceanside can transform itself into a new kind of California beach town — before it’s too late.

While many visitors and even Californians may see the vast expanses of sand as part of California’s natural beauty, the reality is that over decades it has become a man-made wonder.

Sand from other parts of the coast or from offshore banks known as “lending sites” has been added over the decades to build postcard-worthy beaches like Santa Monica’s. In Newport Beach and Ventura, narrow walls of rock called breakwaters were installed decades ago to combat erosion and help keep these beaches watered.

But a number of factors have conspired to shrink beaches along the entire California coast. A recent study predicted that the state could lose up to 75% of its beaches by 2100, given rising sea levels related to the climate emergency. Over time, sand from the beach is washed into the water. Some of it migrates to other beaches as part of a complex phenomenon known as longshore drift.

If the coastline could evolve and recede without human intervention, beaches could continue to exist as we know them. But in California, settlement in many places along the coast has created a solid barrier, interrupting this natural retreat.

At the same time, concrete dams and channels have reduced the amount of river sediment flowing downstream and could help replenish beach sand. And nearby cliffs, which would normally erode, were fortified to protect homes and railroad tracks built on them.

Oceanside has grown from a seaside resort town incorporated in 1888 to a major San Diego suburb of 172,000 people. The length of the coastline has been altered by two major projects.

During World War II, the United States built a Marine base, Camp Pendleton, just north of town, and included a place for ships heading to the Pacific. Later, in the 1960s, the city built its own recreational harbor.

Over time, the port and boathouse, protected by a network of rock breakwaters, began to prevent sand from reaching the city’s beaches.

US Army engineers dredge the harbor mouth every year. It costs the city an additional $600,000 to pump fine, muddy sediment from the San Luis Rey River to the southern beaches. But the effort usually produces only enough sand to cover a small area, and it is quickly washed away by the waves.

Other communities in San Diego County were also dealing with the same problem, so over the years local governments have teamed up on some big sand replenishment projects. But these too proved to be temporary solutions.

In May 2022, the city hired Jayme Timberlake as its first waterfront administrator. A native of the area, she surfs every morning and takes her two children to junior lifeguard lessons. Timberlake says she saw the moment as an opportunity.

She launched an international competition with the aim of finding new ways to get and keep sand on the city’s beaches. “It really is a race,” she says. “We need to get started and implement something before there is too much sea level rise or too many storms that have a catastrophic impact.”

The city solicited entries from 36 companies and, in August, narrowed the field down to three teams. At a community meeting last Tuesday, residents packed Oceanside City Hall to hear team representatives present their ideas for the first time.

Deltares, a Dutch company, showed images of floating islands, built on the water, with kelp forests below them. Scape, a US landscape architecture firm, suggested creating a dune system that would use natural stones as a kind of anchor for the sand. International Coastal Management, an engineering firm from Australia, has proposed an offshore artificial reef to collect sand, similar to the one it built on the Gold Coast.

But ultimately, Oceanside and other coastal cities may have to accept that wide, sandy beaches will no longer be part of their future, says Gary Griggs, a professor specializing in coastal science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who serves as a consultant for the competition. “I think we have to face the reality that, in the long term, there is absolutely nothing we can do to contain the Pacific Ocean. Everything we do is short term.”