 mailbag
Our “Standing Up To Seawalls” article solicited numerous comments and questions from readers. To help answer this month’s mailbag, Making Waves solicited help from the environmental staff at Surfrider Foundation’s national headquarters.
Dear Making Waves,
The cover photo on your June 2003 issue entitled Standing Up to seawalls and the caption inside the magazine is misleading. The wall the surfer is standing next to is a natural wave cut rock face common to your California coast, not a seawall constructed to prevent erosion. There has been some rebar added in an attempt to shore up this cliff to slow the attack of the ocean, but the cliff would be there regardless of mans interference. I am as concerned as you are about unnecessary coastal armoring and we here in Texas are constantly challenging the armoring by geotextile tubes along our coast. For our technical arguments against manmade armoring we must be completely accurate and credible in our arguments and case histories to influence our local governments, agencies, and landowners.
John C. Branca
Houston, Texas
Mark Rauscher, Environmental Manager writes: The cover of the June 2003 issue of Making Waves shows what looks like a nice brown sandstone bluff with cobbles in place. It is actually a concrete wall that has been “textured” to look like natural rock instead of a monolithic concrete wall. These walls are held in place by tiebacks that are drilled up to sixty feet into the natural bluff. Take a look at the same seawall, shot from a different angle in the picture below. Not only does the concrete not look like the natural bluff, it certainly does not behave like the natural sandstone. The material does not erode and contributes to the narrowing of beaches in this area.
Dear Making Waves,
Two of Surfrider Foundation’s main points of focus are seawalls and public access. You do not favor seawalls because of harmful effects such as erosion and beach loss. You do favor public access for surfing and public enjoyment of the ocean. What is your position when a staircase or other hard structure is needed for public access, but this same hard structure can cause erosion like seawalls?
Marco A. Sigala
Salinas, CA
Chad Nelsen, Environmental Director writes: This is a great question and a tough one too. It is always a challenge when two issues are competing. It is very difficult to answer this question generally because each individual case where this conflict might arise probably has a unique solution.
In general, we hope that structures that are built very close to an eroding coastline will be engineered to have the flexibility to be moved back as the coast erodes. This results in a system that works with nature instead of fighting it.
In the case of staircases down to a beach on an eroding bluff, such as the case at Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz, I believe we could develop a creative solution where a set of stairs could be built in such a way that as the coast erodes the stairs could be rebuilt or modified to account for the changes in the coastline. Although this would be a challenging effort, I think it would ultimately balance the need to provide access with a solution that doesn’t harden the coast and fight the naturally occurring erosion.
Making Waves welcomes letters from our readers. Send your hoots, hollers and hassles to
makingwaves@surfrider.org. Please make sure to include your name and location. In order to print as many letters as possible, some letters may be edited for length.
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