Transit officials are looking at two inland sources for sand to stabilize the eroding beach beside the railroad in San Clemente that is San Diego County’s only train route to Los Angeles and the rest of the United States.
“We are working through the process,” said Orange County Transportation Authority Executive Director of Capital Programs Jim Beil.
Any sand obtained from inland sources would have to be screened and tested for use on the beach, Beil said, at the OCTA’s meeting last week in San Clemente, where the board voted unanimously to authorize Chief Executive Officer Darrell E. Johnson to proceed with the efforts.
Landslides have stopped trains from traveling through San Clemente for months at a time in recent years. The tracks follow the edge of the beach for about six miles there, where the rails are threatened on one side by coastal erosion and on the other side by crumbling bluffs.
Earlier this year, the California Coastal Commission approved plans for emergency stabilization work to replenish sand, repair the rock riprap barriers and build a catchment wall to protect the most endangered sections of tracks.
Most of the beachfront riprap repairs have been completed, Beil said, and a construction contract for the catchment wall to be built on the landward side of the tracks has been awarded to Condon-Johnson and Associates.
One of the potential sand sites is at the Prado dam on the Santa Ana River near Corona, Beil said. The sediment that accumulates in the basin behind the dam must be removed as part of the reservoir’s maintenance and has the potential to yield up to 100,000 cubic yards of material annually.
The other area is a commercial site known as Garnet Pit near Palm Springs, he said. The Garnet Pit could provide up to 10,000 cubic yards of sand, and the material could be obtained relatively quickly, possibly in a few months.
The initial 10,000 cubic yards can only be placed on the beach above the mean high tide line because of federal restrictions, Beil said. Further replenishment efforts, once cleared under the National Environmental Policy Act, will be distributed further on the beach into the surf.
In addition to the land-based sand sources, OCTA is continuing to work with the California Coastal Commission, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies to obtain approval for dredging up to 240,000 cubic yards from nearby deposits in the ocean to use at San Clemente.
San Clemente, like most Southern California coastal cities, needs more sand to restore its eroding beaches.
Last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers placed about 140,000 cubic yards of sand on the beach near the San Clemente Pier in the first phase of a federal project expected to continue periodically for 50 years. That project, planned for decades, used material dredged from ocean deposits and was unrelated to OCTA’s emergency rail stabilization efforts.
Also, San Clemente and its Orange County neighbor Dana Point both have asked for the first time to join a proposed regional replenishment project led by the San Diego Association of Governments, the region’s planning agency.
That effort would be an expansion of two previous regional replenishments completed by SANDAG in 2001 and 2012 that used ocean sand to widen beaches from Oceanside to Imperial Beach.