Toward the end of last summer, strollers and surfers who for years walked gingerly across cobble on San Diego County beaches found a blanket of sand to cushion their steps. At a cost of $17.5 million, mostly in federal funds, two million cubic yards of sand were dredged from the seafloor at six offshore sites, pumped ashore, and spread with bulldozers on 12 denuded beaches.

These beaches were once replenished naturally by sand that washed downriver or crumbled from seabluffs. Since the middle of the past century, however, more and more of this resource has been held back by dams, debris basins, jetties, seawalls, and other sediment-blocking structures. In an area famous for its beaches, this loss has been keenly felt. Local communities therefore organized and, after some five years of passionate advocacy and hard work, succeeded in bringing in this new sand.

Even today, however—a mere six months later—a walk on some of those beaches could be disappointing, for much of that new sand is gone, washed away by winter storm waves. By early January, eight beaches that had received relatively large-grained sand were “holding up pretty well,” while the others, with finer-grained sand, had pretty much lost it, according to Steve Sachs, senior planner at the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), which implemented the Regional Beach Sand Project. At Torrey Pines State Beach “it moved offshore fast,” said Robert Guza, professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the project’s monitors. “It might or might not come back, and that may be hard to tell, for it could come back and spread out.”

Beaches generally lose sand to heavy winter waves, but they get some of it back during the summer, when wave action is gentler. If the nearshore slope at these beaches is steep, much of the new sand may accumulate deeper down, reducing the gradient of the beach slope and thus serving as protection against powerful waves.

“We stress that this was a pilot project,” said Steve Aceti, executive director of the California Coastal Coalition (CalCoast), a nonprofit advocacy group comprising 32 coastal cities, five counties, and various regional organizations, which has campaigned for this sand replenishment project. SANDAG hopes to spread another two million or so cubic yards on beaches in the next few years, and this project will provide guidance.

Artificial nourishment is a long-accepted practice in Florida, New Jersey, Hawaii, Spain, and other places with highly valued beaches. In California, some opportunistic projects have shown its value. The famous wide beaches of Santa Monica, for example, are not natural: they were built in 1948 with 14.5 million cubic yards of sand piped as slurry from the Hyperion Dunes during the construction of the Hyperion sewage treatment plant. SANDAG’s project, however, is the first multi-jurisdictional regional effort along these lines.

Support for this form of beach management has grown among coastal scientists, beach managers, coastal advocacy groups, and legislators. Advocates believe it may be the cheapest and most environmentally sound approach to the chronic problem of beach erosion and bluff collapse, forestalling the construction of seawalls that often degrade beaches more and contribute to further erosion.

Some critics, in contrast, contend that spending millions to pour sand onto beaches is tantamount to pouring tax money into the ocean.

In fact, the $17 million price of the SANDAG project is a pittance, considering the value of beaches—not to mention the price of some blufftop houses in San Diego County, one of which was recently on the market for more than $20 million, observed Robert Wiegel, professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, at the annual conference of the California Shore and Beach Preservation Association and CalCoast, held in San Diego November 8–10, 2001.

The economic benefits are obvious to blufftop homeowners, among them Paul and Lynn Santina, who purchased a home in Solana Beach about a year ago for nearly $1 million. From 80 feet above the ocean the views are fabulous. One day last May, however, part of their property fell away when a bluff gave way as a neighbor was trying to reinforce it by driving steel pilings 40 feet into it. A concrete slab, part of a patio extension the neighbor was building, slid down toward the shore, taking with it a workman who had been standing on it. (A ledge broke the slide and he survived without serious injury.) The collapse also took part of the Santinas’ next-door neighbor’s yard, so that her bedroom had to be dismantled.

Now the three neighbors are building a 100-foot long, 35-foot high seawall to shore up the base of the bluff, sharing the cost, estimated at $400,000. They intend to regain the blufftop area they lost by rebuilding the bluff face and reinforcing it. The neighbor who lost her bedroom, a woman in her 80s, will have it rebuilt where it was. The homeowners have an emergency permit, which the law requires the Coastal Commission to grant when homes are in danger.

Paul Santina is campaigning for one long seawall along the entire stretch of this eroding coast. He also favors beach nourishment.

Will the entire north San Diego County shoreline be armored and seawalled? oceanographer Reinhard Flick, of Scripps and the California Department of Boating and Waterways, put that question to the shore and beach conference on the last day. People were reluctant to say yes, but those who said “no” knew the odds were against them. Don Nierlich of Coastwalk inquired: “And are we going to have plastic pelicans too?”

Advocates look to sand nourishment as an alternative to seawalls. In addition, offshore structures that mimic natural headlands have been proposed to help keep sand in place (see Coast & Ocean, Autumn 1998). Studies are under way to determine whether some obsolete dams can be removed, restoring some of the natural sand supply.

Taking a long view, the Coastal Conservancy, Coastal Commission, and the Department of Boating and Waterways have prepared a proposal for a California Coastal Sediment Management Master Plan that encompasses watersheds and nearshore waters and comprehensively identifies problems and opportunities related to flood control, water supply and quality, habitats, bluff erosion, navigational needs, and shoreline change. This plan would evaluate needs on a regional basis and develop approaches that generate the greatest environmental and economic benefits. This year, for the first time “in recent memory,” according to Aceti, the governor’s proposed budget includes funds for beach restoration, $6.5 million. More than half would go to constructing a project in Imperial Beach, the rest to studies.

Meanwhile, SANDAG is searching for ways to fund the $15 million second phase of its Regional Sand Project. It is looking at a possible hotel and property transfer tax, and at extending and broadening an existing transportation tax or sales tax.

Sand that’s right for beaches isn’t much easier to find than money. Before deciding to dredge from offshore, SANDAG tried to use sand that the Navy was dredging from San Diego Harbor. It turned out to have live ammunition (see Coast &Ocean, Summer 1998). The City of Oceanside also looked into a “trash for sand” proposal: a waste management company that hauls coastal garbage to an Arizona landfill was to return with clean desert sand. Logistical problems sank that idea. At the shore and beach conference, Robert Wiegel suggested that affordable sand might be obtainable in China. It’s an idea whose time might come.

In California, 70 to 90 percent of beach sand used to be brought to beaches by rivers and streams. A smaller amount, varying according to topography, came down from eroding bluffs (about 12 percent along the coast between Oceanside and La Jolla, according to a recent study funded by the Coastal Conservancy). With 480 dams now blocking river flows and more and more bluffs reinforced by seawalls, many California beaches are sand-starved and vulnerable to storm waves.