Posted on October 23, 2024
A wealthy beachside town in California is running out of sand. The situation is so desperate, city officials have started scouring the Pacific Ocean looking for a new source.
The San Clemente City Council approved a nearly $800,000 contract last week with an engineering firm to hunt for millions of cubic yards of sand to restore the city’s beaches. San Clemente is already spending millions of dollars a year bringing sand to its beaches, but it has now run out of good locations to collect sand.
Transporting sand to the coast is an expensive endeavor and becomes even pricier if the sand is far away from the delivery site. The city has two planned beach replenishment projects in the works, with the intention to deliver 1.5 million pounds of sand to area beaches, but neither project has an approved sand source, according to an Oct. 15 agenda report.
The city is expecting to run sand replenishment projects every five to six years for the next five decades, meaning finding sustainable sand sources is crucial for protecting its beaches, according to the agenda report.
FILE: A surfer walks near a worker in a bulldozer moving fresh sand delivered via barge to the main public beach during a sand replenishment project along eroding shoreline on May 21, 2024, in San Clemente, Calif.
The OC Register reported Monday that the work to find a new sand source could begin as early as this week and that the survey could find an “ancient sandbar” near San Clemente with adequate amounts of sand for the city. The survey is paid for by a grant funded by the California Coastal Commission.
San Clemente is a wealthy coastal town at the southern end of Orange County that is famous for its Spanish architecture and world-class surfing. Sand loss at its beaches has become a major problem in recent years, as erosion has reduced the size of its prized beaches as well as threatened the Pacific Surfliner Amtrak train, which runs through the city on its way from San Diego to San Luis Obispo. The train has closed five times since 2021 because of erosion.
FILE: An aerial view of an Amtrak Pacific Surfliner train passing an unreplenished section of beach along eroding shoreline on May 20, 2024, in San Clemente, Calif.
Keeping San Clemente’s beaches sandy is guaranteed to cost city taxpayers millions of dollars. The city is asking voters this November to approve a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for beach replenishment, among other items. City Manager Andy Hall told the OC Register in August that the city expects to spend roughly $10 million a year on sand projects.
American governments have spent billions of dollars on beach nourishment projects over the past century, but some researchers question if moving sand is a sustainable way to protect beaches long term, especially as climate change raises sea levels and brings increasingly strong storms to coastal communities.
