Could dredging hurt beaches?

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT BEACH--The city’s new dredging permit is good news for boaters,

but some people say they are concerned it could hurt beaches.

The California Coastal Commission this month approved a limited version

of the city’s blanket dredging permit, which had expired in August.

In the wake of that decision, the wheels are in motion to get at least

some of the silt out from the channels and boat slips where it has been

accumulating and wreaking nautical havoc, boaters and dredging operators

say.

“It’s opening things,” said Plazi Miller of Shellmaker Inc., a Newport

Beach dredging company.

But residents say the city’s problems with sand and silt are far from

over.

Because the Coastal Commission insists that dredge spoils must be fairly

sandy to be dumped on beaches, a significant amount of what gets dredged

in Newport waters will have to be disposed at sea, where siltier spoils

are permitted.

Some people say that makes them worry about the long-term loss of sand in

the area.

“The bottom line will be that there will be probably less beach

restoration within the harbor and more [ocean disposal of spoils],” said

Mark Sites, who runs Intracoastal Dredging on Balboa.

“In four to 10 years, either the shallow bulkheads will fall in, or the

beaches that the people enjoy now just won’t be there, or there will be a

much larger step down to the beach.”

In some areas, it’s already a steep drop from the bulkhead -- the

structure that separates the sand from the land -- to the beach.

At the end of Jade Street on Little Balboa Island, for example, the drop

is more than six feet from a bay-front sidewalk to the muddy flats that

serve as a beach. At other spots on the island, by contrast, the drop is

about one foot and sand is ample.

Balboa resident Todd Johnson, who keeps his boat in Long Beach because of

the shallow conditions here, said he doesn’t feel like the restrictions

on beach dumping make sense for this area.

“All these islands were built by dredging,” he said. “The [permit]

resolution is still not what the city of Newport Beach needs.”

Mark Delaplaine, a federal consistency supervisor for the Coastal

Commission, said he thinks the actual effects of the commission’s

requirements on beach dumping of spoils probably will be far less

significant than some residents suggest.

“It’s not going to cause any kind of cumulative long-term loss that’s

really going to be noticeable,” he said. “These are not big quantities of

sand.”

Moreover, he said, the commission has good reasons for wanting beaches to

be replenished with spoils that are not extremely silty.

“It’s just not worth the risk” of contamination, he said, especially when

silty soils tend to be aesthetically unpleasant.

And though long-term concerns about bulkhead collapse are a serious

issue, Delaplaine argued that insufficiently sandy spoils were a poor

long-term solution to the problem.

“It doesn’t stay that long [on the beach] anyway” if the spoils are very

fine-grained, he said. “So you’ve lost whatever benefit you got.”