COVER STORY : BEACH EROSION : Waves Constantly Reshape Sandy Strip Between Expensive Homes and Sea

“Hey, we better call the water company,” O.B. Hughes said to his wife one evening a few years ago. “It looks like a water-main break.” Standing at his front window, Hughes could see water burbling like a mountain brook across Ocean Boulevard, the Alamitos Bay peninsula’s main drag.

But this was no problem with pipes. This was one of the Pacific Ocean’s periodic visits to the Hugheses’ Long Beach neighborhood.

Every couple of years or so, the sea prances over the bulkhead next to the peninsula’s beachfront houses, makes itself at home in people’s garages, soaks into carpets and then--like a hotel guest stealing towels--departs with a big chunk of the beach.

The city fights back, bringing in truckload after truckload of sand--25,824 cubic yards of it last year--scooped up from wider beaches to the east. But the sea keeps coming, dashing over the wall or just gnawing, gnawing, gnawing at the shoreline.

Recently, at high tide, waves have been lapping perilously close to the beach houses between 62nd and 64th places, and a stretch of beach next to the Alamitos Bay jetty, once a popular surfing spot, has been dissolving like sugar in the waves.

“We dump sand there (next to the jetty) every day, and it just washes away,” said Rosie Bouquin, capital projects coordinator for the Long Beach Department of Parks, Recreation and Marine. “It’s really scary.”

Two months ago, an unusually high tide sent water rushing over a five-foot sand berm city workers had constructed, lapping over the boardwalk near a house at the corner of 64th Place and Ocean Boulevard. The sea nuzzled against the front door and rushed around the side to flood the back patio. Then it receded, taking about 50 feet of the beach with it.

“We never had that before,” said a woman who lives in the house. She asked that her name not be used.

Beach erosion--whether it is an implacable wearing away of the shoreline or a sudden loss of big scoops of sand--is a problem that beachfront cities from Santa Barbara to San Diego have been struggling with for decades.

And like other California cities, Long Beach finds itself tackling the big problems with less money. In recent years, the state has seized ever greater shares of property taxes and revenues from city oil wells, while the recession and Defense Department cutbacks were shrinking other sources of municipal income.

Budget problems or not, residents of the peninsula--where homes cost between $600,000 and $700,000, with beachfront houses going for as high as $2 million--want the city to do more for their disappearing beach.

“We’ve been furious about the whole thing, the way we keep losing the beach time and again and they keep promising to replace it,” said the woman with the flooded patio at 64th Place.

It is a dilemma, city officials concede. The beach, which three years ago was an expansive 150 feet from boardwalk to ocean, was recently down to 25 feet near the point where seawater flooded the back-yard patio. It dwindled to virtually nothing at the east end eight blocks away.

So what to do?

The first line of defense against beach loss has always been the city, which tends to the shoreline. Aside from its annual rebuilding efforts, using heavy equipment to dump sand into the skinny parts, the city has spent $3.5 million in recent years on experimental solutions, some of them fanciful enough to be right out of an H.G. Wells story.

City workers have planted rows of artificial kelp in the harbor on the theory that undulating plastic leaves would stabilize the sand. They have laid a bed of 70,000 cubic yards of pea gravel in front of the narrow beach sections in hope that the coarse gravel would hold the finer sand. They have built a “reef” out of “sand pillows,” two-ton nylon bags of sand, to try to slow the waves.

But nothing worked for long.

“You won’t stop erosion,” said Preston Smith, a retired dentist who has become one of the peninsula’s most outspoken beach preservationists. “You just try to slow it down.”

But with the new budget constraints, the city is under pressure to come up with the final solution, said Phil Hester, parks manager.

The costs of fighting beach erosion, more than $500,000 last year, are soaring, city officials say, and other beach communities have demands of their own.

“Ninety percent of our beaches are not affected by erosion,” Hester said. “Those people want us to work on trash removal. The other 10% want us to work on erosion. We just don’t have the resources to move sand all the time.”

Should the city invest in new protective structures to keep the sea away from the peninsula beach or resign itself to paying to reconstruct the beach every time the sand washes away?

The City Council, acting on a motion by Councilman Douglas S. Drummond, who represents the peninsula area, has directed the city’s nine-member Marine Advisory Commission to hold hearings on the problem to determine how the community wants to solve it.

“We can’t afford to replenish the beach with sand year after year,” said Drummond, who has pressed for a long-term remedy, maybe another rock jetty extending at a right angle from the tip of the existing jetty.

Talk like that makes peninsula residents nervous. It’s not that the city would abandon their beach to the waves, residents say. It’s that city officials might feel compelled to build another seawall to block the open sea altogether. “If we’re enclosed in a horseshoe,” Smith said, “it will cut off all circulation.”

Without the cleansing of waves and currents, Smith says, the peninsula would soon begin to look like the notorious West Beach area where the Los Angeles River empties into the sea, near the Queen Mary.

“That darkness there--algae,” he said, pointing westward with a look of distaste.

Longtime residents of the peninsula, a tidy two-block-wide community of about 2,000, tend to be philosophical about the give and take with the sea. “It’s hell on your Persian rugs,” laughed one resident. But it’s part of life there.

A winter storm could blow in any day now, O.B. Hughes and others point out, rumbling through the gap between the breakwater and the jetties that define the channel into Alamitos Bay, leaving a ragged row of rocks where sand used to be.

“Whenever there’s a high tide backed by a storm, that’s when we can get a real beaut,” said Pat Kempster, who has lived on the peninsula more than 60 years.

“It’s those storms from Baja,” said Hughes, a retired high school coach, looking edgily to the south.

Geologists and oceanographers who have studied beach erosion in Southern California blame it largely on the rising level of the sea and the grinding of tectonic plates against each other, creating a steep coastline that is vulnerable to fast-moving waves. But man-made structures have been speeding up the process, they say.

Development, both along the shore and inland, has interrupted the natural cycle of loss and replenishment, scientists say.

Dams and flood basins in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains are bulging with the sandy material that used to wash down stream beds to nourish the beaches. Man-made seawalls prevent cliffs from crumbling and feeding the beaches with new sand. And the beaches are starving.

“The rivers are all cemented in,” said Douglas Inman, former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “They’re no longer sand-yielding rivers.”

Water in the world’s oceans has been rising since the early Middle Ages at a rate of about 20 centimeters per century. “It doesn’t sound like much, but put a few centuries together and you’ve got significantly deeper water,” Inman said.

Scientists estimate that by 2100, with industrially related global warming bringing even more water from polar icecaps, there could be as much as three more feet of water in the oceans, lapping hungrily at oceanfront communities.

In Southern California, it is the beaches that stand between the irresistible force of the ocean and the not-so-immovable object of oceanfront homes.

“The beach is a dissipating medium,” Inman said. “Waves break and all the wave’s energy is extended across the surf zone.”

Without those broad buffers of sand to absorb the power of storms and slow the waves, beach dwellers can suddenly find themselves eyeball to eyeball with a moving wall of water carrying all of the destructive power of a pile driver.

Kempster shows snapshots of herself and a friend on the peninsula during the “hurricane” of 1939. The storm--not really a hurricane but a particularly violent squall--carried most of the peninsula beach away, and waves rained down in billowing sheets on the two young women, cringing giddily on the boardwalk.

“For us it was fun,” Kempster said.

But for the residents whose houses were either swept away or left high and dry on skeletal pilings, the storm was a graphic demonstration of the vulnerability of beachless coasts.

A century ago, the Long Beach shore was broad and untouched, with new sand washed in by the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers to make up for the losses from storms and longshore currents. “Some considered it the finest beach in the country,” said Smith, who has made the study of erosion one of his passions.

In a normal year, probably between 200,000 and 300,000 cubic yards of sand washed down from the mountains, as an equivalent amount was swept down the coast by currents, oceanographers say.

But in 1899 workers began a project that would take nearly 50 years--building the breakwater to protect the shore from currents and head-on storms, establishing the sort of wave-free environment necessary for Long Beach Harbor.

There followed the U.S. Naval Station, the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and, at the east end of the city, the Alamitos Bay jetties, extending 2,000 feet into the ocean. Meanwhile, 20 miles to the north, Los Angeles County was building its vast flood control system, a 2,500-mile network of open channels and underground storm drains, with 15 major dams and 354 debris basins to capture sand and rocky material.

By 1946, Long Beach was sealed off from the open sea except for a two-mile gap between the end of the breakwater and the tip of the jetties at the border with Orange County. The city’s beaches had become the most protected in the state.

And there still have been erosion problems.

It is through the gap, due south of the peninsula, that the storms and those gnawing winter waves arrive. “Winter waves tend to be smaller and quicker, like lawn-mower blades,” Smith said.

Even with all the construction in place, the beach began to narrow and widen unpredictably.

There were times when a bather--a reckless one--could have done a swan dive into the sea from the peninsula boardwalk. There were times when the beach was luxuriantly broad, particularly after dredging operations in the 1960s and 1970s deposited tons of sand on the shore.

In recent years, as far as an army of beach consultants has been able to determine, the sand appears to have been washing away from the east end of the peninsula and accumulating near the west end.

The consultants still have not pinpointed a cause, but the results are striking. A boat-launching ramp at Claremont Avenue, 12 blocks west of the point where ocean waves have been lapping against houses, jutted into the sea two years ago. Now the ramp is more than 100 feet from the waves.

“It comes and it goes,” said Bouquin, the capital projects coordinator. “The problem is holding a continuous piece of beach.”

The trend nowadays is against “hard solutions” to keep beaches from eroding, scientists say. At its most extreme, the trend says: Leave the beaches alone and allow them to find a natural balance, even if it means losing beachfront homes and piers.

Duke University geologist Orrin Pilkey, the most outspoken proponent of allowing the beaches to follow their own course, says that seawalls and other types of hard structures have been built to protect the rights of wealthy property owners.

“They’re the ones who create difficulties of access to the beaches and create a demand for building more seawalls, taxing the many to save their beaches,” said Pilkey, though even he concedes that urban recreational beaches should be protected.

On the peninsula, however, people who live in million-dollar beachfront homes have joined with renters and less well-to-do homeowners to try to keep the beaches as natural as possible.

A meeting of the Alamitos Bay Peninsula Beach Preservation Group can sound at times like a conclave of civil engineers, with lawyers, real estate agents and construction workers talking knowledgeably about berms, wave energy and dynamic contouring.

The consensus is that the city is obliged to keep shoveling sand their way. “The beach is one of the city’s most valuable assets,” Smith said.

The group has persuaded city officials to try some soft approaches, such as building a sandy bulge--a salient--near the critically narrow part of the beach, in hopes that it will deflect some of those destructive currents.

Some scientists see nothing wrong with protecting the beaches. They’re part of the urban infrastructure as much as parks or streets, says Scripps oceanographer Reinhold Flick, who advocates a policy of “constructive interference.”

Southern California beaches are largely man-made, Flick said. Beaches between Santa Barbara and San Diego have been bolstered and artificially widened with 100 million cubic yards of sand, mostly from large dredging operations before 1960.

“This is a city,” Flick said, talking generally about Southern California beach communities. “Fine. You’ve got to change the bulbs in the street lights. So you change the sand every once in a while. So what?”

Cost of Erosion

Expenditures by the city of Long Beach to fight Alamitos Bay Peninsula beach erosion.

1989: $100,000

1990: $100,000

1991: $250,000

1992: $256,000

1993: $514,000*

* Includes $300,000 allotted for uncompleted project to bolster east end of beach with 10,000 tons of rock.

Source: City of Long Beach