Posted on May 16, 2017
The annual dredging of the Oceanside harbor entrance channel has again hit rough waters.
Bad weather and equipment problems have set the work days or even weeks behind schedule, though officials say they hope to catch up. The dredging began in mid-April and is to be completed by the end of May before the Memorial Day weekend.
Last year the project started late and stretched on for months, in part because of rough seas and a new contractor with too-small equipment. City officials publicly fumed about equipment on the beach during tourist season.
This year, a veteran contractor returned: Manson Construction Co. of Seattle, which has larger equipment and years of experience dredging the harbor. Still, new challenges emerged.
“(Work) shut down for several days because of sea conditions,” said Greg Fuderer, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency in charge of the project. “The other thing is that during rough seas a piece of equipment … popped off.”
That equipment, called a swing block, fell off the dredging barge and went to the bottom of the harbor sometime last week. Manson searched with divers and hired a vessel with an on-board magnetometer to locate the missing piece, but days later it hadn’t been found.
Officials said they would order another swing block and work should resume by the end of this week.
The deadline for completing the dredging is Memorial Day weekend, the official start of the summer tourist season. This year’s contract calls for 280,000 cubic yards of sand to be dredged, but as of Tuesday only about 52,600 cubic yards had been moved.
“It will not go past Memorial Day, we are very firm on that,” Fuderer said.
Oceanside relies on the annual dredging to keep the harbor mouth open for navigation and to pump sand onto the city’s beaches.
“It’s important to our city because of tourism,” Oceanside Mayor Jim Wood said Wednesday. “People don’t like to come down here and find there’s rocks on the beach.”
Wood said he’s confident Manson will finish on time and remove all the sand that’s needed for nearby beaches.
“They are a very competent company, and they have always done a good job,” Wood said. “They are a big improvement over last year.”
Last year’s contractor, CJW Construction of Santa Ana, started in June and finished in October, after big waves and equipment problems forced numerous delays. The same type of ocean swells are causing trouble again this year.
“Even if you have a vessel the size of the Titanic, you can’t take that,” said a worker at the harbor, who asked not to be named. “We pay the price.”
Another difficulty this year, some workers said, is that last year’s dredging left a lot of sand just outside the harbor entrance. As a result, the mouth of the harbor is more shallow than ever, which creates bigger waves and rougher seas in the area where dredging is needed.
The goal of dredging is to keep the harbor entrance about 25 feet deep for safe navigation. Last summer parts of the entrance were as shallow as 8 feet.
The Corps of Engineers pays about $5 million annually for the harbor dredging contract.
Last year CJW had a one-year contract with an option to renew for two more years. The contract wasn’t renewed.
Manson also has a one-year contract with options to renew. Intending to secure those renwals, the company has buried its sand-transportation pipe on the beach from the harbor to the San Luis Rey River, so it will not be an obstacle to beachgoers.
This week the above-ground pipe ended at about Windward Way. When dredging resumes, sand will be spread south to the pier, and past the pier if there’s enough sand.
Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune
