Posted on May 22, 2018
By Phil Diehl, The San Diego Union-Tribune
A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official confirmed this week that the annual spring dredging of the Oceanside harbor has fallen through, meaning less sand for the city’s starving beaches this summer.
The Corps has hired contractors to dredge the harbor entrance every year for decades to keep it deep enough for safe navigation. Sand pumped from the harbor is piped to nearby beaches to keep them wide and attractive to tourists, and to protect the roads, homes and other structures along the shore.
“We will be delaying the maintenance dredging of the Oceanside Harbor until fall,” Corps spokesman Jay Field said in an email. “Our survey crew continues to monitor the harbor entrance channel to ensure sufficient depth for safe navigation.”
Corps officials said as late as April that they hoped to finish the dredging by Memorial Day, but they were having trouble getting a permit required from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board.
Field said a letter to the city is being written that will have more information about the delay, but he offered no further details.
Water board officials said in April that the Corps had waited too long to apply for a permit that usually requires months to obtain.
“It was strictly that they couldn’t get the permit from the water board in time,” Kiel Koger, Oceanside’s public works division manager, said Thursday.
The contractor that did the work last year, Manson Construction of Seattle, was expected to return this year. However, the company needs its equipment for a job scheduled to start in June in Seattle, Koger said.
“We are a little frustrated … and not real happy,” he said.
San Diego County beaches all lose sand over the winter by erosion to storms, high tides and big waves. Summer ocean currents and gentle waves restore some of the sand, but most years there’s a net loss.
Waves and currents also push sand into the entrance of the man-made harbor, gradually filling it up. As the entrance grows more shallow, the size of the surf increases, making navigation difficult. Normally, the harbor is at least 20 feet deep, but a single big storm can reduce the depth to as little as 10 feet.
“The Corps has told us that because we dredged so much material last year, we should be okay through the summer as far as navigation,” Koger said. “We could wait until spring.”
Typically, the dredging removes about 250,000 cubic yards of sand from the harbor and delivers it to the beach. Last year, on top of the base $3.7 million federal contract, the city paid $600,000 and the Navy and the Corps added $625,000 to boost the amount dredged to 440,000 cubic yards. As a result, fresh sand was spread south of the muncipal pier for the first time in years.
Despite that sandy success, a separate Oceanside beach restoration project fell through last year.
The Corps’ San Luis Rey River flood-control project failed to launch in October after multiple delays, also largely because of problems with permits.
That effort was expected to remove 230,000 cubic yards of sediment to widen and deepen the river channel, with most of the sand going to central southern Oceanside beaches farther from the harbor.
Former Mayor Jim Wood fired off a letter to the Corps in November requesting a refund of about $1.8 million the city had contributed toward its share of the $5.3 million river project.
Koger said Thursday the city received $30,000 back to cover some of its staff time, but the federal agency kept the rest of the money toward the eventual completion of the project. No new date has been set for the work, which was originally to start in 2016.
“We were really looking forward to the San Luis Rey project,” said Leslee Gaul, president and CEO of Visit Oceanside, the city’s tourism marketing agency.
Tourism, an important and growing part of Oceanside’s economy, clearly depends on harbor maintenance and sandy beaches. Research shows that more than 88 percent of visitors say the beaches are Oceanside’s top attraction, she said.
“It’s really hard to put a money value on it, but it does impact us,” she said. “It affects vacation rentals. We hear about it, especially from visitors who come here year after year.”
The Corps of Engineers is legally responsible for the safety of the harbor and beaches, Gaul said, and local beaches benefit from that.
Federal officials also pulled the plug last year after funding dried up on another sand-related project, a three-year study begun in 2016 to find a permanent solution to Oceanside’s shoreline erosion.
The Corps’ “shoreline feasibility study” was created to examine the effects the Camp Pendleton harbor, built in 1942, has on Oceanside beaches. The city’s harbor, built in the 1960s, shares its entrance.
Previous studies have showed the harbor entrance diverts sand that otherwise could be carried onto Oceanside beaches naturally by ocean currents.
A similar federal study completed in Solana Beach and Encinitas set the basis for a 50-year sand replenishment project that was allocated $87 million in 2016 as part of the federal Water Resources Development Act.
In the works more than 15 years, that project could begin pumping sand from offshore deposits to sites in Solana Beach and Encinitas later this year.
Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune
