Trail Opens Beach to the Disabled

For the first time in a long time, Francisco Andrade was able to feel the spray of the ocean on his face and watch as waves rushed toward him across a sandy, kelp-strewn beach.

Trips to the beach always were difficult because his wheelchair would get stuck in the sand.

All that changed Thursday when Francisco, 15, joined about 40 other children at Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro to officially inaugurate a new wheelchair-accessible trail from the parking lot to tide pools.

Although there are accessible paths near San Francisco Bay, city officials said the Cabrillo Coastal Park Trail is the country’s first wheelchair-accessible trail leading to an ocean beach on the Pacific Coast.

The trail snakes from a parking lot near the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, across a sandy expanse of beach, around a dusty brown cliff and onto a rocky plateau full of tide pools.

“It’s wonderful,” said Michealle Isaac, Francisco’s mother.

Though her son lives in Carson and goes to school in San Pedro, Isaac said, “we hadn’t bothered to come to the beach much before because he couldn’t get out there. But now we will.”

The convoy of children--some in wheelchairs and others with walkers--snacked on cookies and sodas before heading up the narrow, sloping trail to the water’s edge. Along the trail, many stopped and turned to their parents in wonder.

City officials, along with parents and teachers from the Ernest Willenberg Special Education Center in San Pedro and the Elysian Park Therapeutic Recreation Center in Los Angeles, watched proudly.

“Handicapped children couldn’t get near the ocean before this,” said Barbara Millman, a teacher at the Willenberg school. “We’ve been bringing the children here for seven or eight years, but we’ve never been able to bring them close to the water.”

The Cabrillo Aquarium recently acquired three wheelchairs with big wheels designed to negotiate sand, officials said. But most children had to be pushed in those chairs, whereas the trail allows them to get to the beach on their own steam.

From his wheelchair, Ricardo Villareal, 10, watched as volunteers from the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium showed how a starfish could eat a sea anemone and how a sea anemone could protect itself.

‘I like it,” he said, leaning forward in his wheelchair to get a better look.

“These children are so isolated. This is one more thing my son can do,” said Karen Hess, who added that her son Jonathan suffered brain damage a year and a half ago. “We’ve needed this for a long, long time.”

Aquarium officials dreamed up the idea for the wheelchair-accessible path a few years ago, after they realized that a dirt path out to the tide pools had become dangerous and needed to be replaced, said aquarium Director Susanne Lawrenz-Miller.

The $700,000 project, which was paid for by grants from the California State Coastal Conservancy, the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, includes a paved, wheelchair-accessible trail to an inland beach. The paths also will be used by aquarium officials giving tours of the tide pools, officials said.

“It was exciting to be that close to the water,” Francisco said. “I really like it.”