Lately, San Clemente City Council meetings have been dominated by one question: Where’s the beach going?
The question comes after a year of repeated landslides and damage to public infrastructure, including when the city invested $7.8 million in repairing the historic Casa Romantica site after a landslide destabilized it.
The city has also repeatedly had to help handle landslides damaging the iconic Amtrak Pacific Surfliner rail line, which has spent much of the past year closed.
County Supervisor Katrina Foley, whose district covers part of the coast, said the heavy rains put a renewed focus on stabilizing the coastline as everything is getting washed away.
“The water saturation levels are more than we’ve probably ever had,” Foley said in an interview last month. “We’re not going to stop the ocean.”
Currently, city officials are coordinating with state and local leaders to reopen the train tracks that closed after another recent landslide on one of Orange County’s idyllic coastlines.
[Read: Southern Storms Spell Trouble for Battered San Clemente Rail Line]
The landslides have become so regular the state is now paying for a $7.2 million retaining wall to stop future landslides from spilling onto the tracks.
Yet there’s still mounting questions over how much it will cost to ensure the ocean doesn’t overtake the entire rail line in the coming years.
Mike Moodian, a professor of political science at Chapman University who also produced a documentary looking at the state’s disappearing beaches, said it’s an issue taking off across the state.
“Capistrano Beach is a wasteland today, now it looks like a scene from a Mad Max movie,” Moodian said in an interview. “What we’re going to see is a continued emphasis on short term solutions like armoring the coasts through walls and rocks, but it’s just going to kick the can down the road.”
While a disappearing beach is an issue most of Orange County’s coastal cities are wrestling with, San Clemente has arguably felt more effects than any other city in recent years.
[Read: Rainstorms Put New Focus on An Orange County Coastline Washing Away]
Last year, city leaders celebrated when the Army Corps of Engineers moved forward with a new sand replenishment program that was set to add over 50 feet of shoreline back to the beach.
But the project stalled out in February due to the harsh weather, and when the Army got to the place they planned to take sand from all they could find was gravel and cobblestone that wouldn’t sit well on the beach.
Right now, it’s unclear when the project could begin moving forward again, with city and federal leaders promising they’re still in talks.
“We all want the same thing – sand on the beach,” said Army Colonel Andrew Baker in a news release last week.
On Tuesday night, multiple residents came out to share their concerns about the vanishing coastline as city leaders voted to reactivate a program dubbed SCOUP, which could help restore some sand to the beachfront.
Suzanne Whitelaw, co-founder and president of Save Our Beaches SC, brought photos to the meeting highlighting how in some places the coastline was so far back it was lapping a few feet away from buildings, while in others high tide essentially erased the beach altogether.
“We need a SCOUP permit first,” Whitelaw said. “Let’s do it.”
In the past, the SCOUP program brought 17,000 cubic yards of sand to North Beach, with city leaders noting the new program could cost between $250,000 to $400,000.
City Manager Andy Hall also mentioned that county leaders were looking to get a similar SCOUP permit for the entire coastline, but that the city was looking to get their own to get ahead of the curve.
“We are moving ahead of that, we want to move at a faster pace,” Hall said. “Hopefully we can be a little bit more aggressive and maybe maneuver just a little bit quicker.”
City Council members unanimously approved getting the new permit, with Mayor Victor Cabral saying it still could be expensive.
“It’s free sand but we’ve got to pay the transportation costs,” Cabral said. “That can be expensive.”
At Tuesday night’s meeting, city staff also highlighted new resources they posted online to help residents who live at the edge of the bluffs, including how to test if their water pipes were broken during a landslide.
City staff also said they’d be checking to be sure residents were properly maintaining the drainage on their properties to help reduce the frequency of landslides.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.