Sand Swept Out in January Has Returned for a New Winter

Marty Richmond, her pants rolled knee high as she strolled along the ocean’s edge, gazed at the mobile homes lining the broad, arcing strand just northwest of Laguna Beach.

Richmond had taken the same walk in January, just days after the winter’s most powerful storm had swept away tons of sand, leaving some of the homes at El Morro Beach Mobilehome Park teetering on weakened foundations.

Now, 10 months later, the gentler tides of summer and early fall had carried back most of the sand lost during that awesome 2-day storm, restoring the narrow buffer between El Morro residents and disaster.

“Every winter, nature takes a huge bite out of this beach, and every summer the sand returns,” said Richmond, a Laguna Beach native who often walks on El Morro Beach. “It’s like clockwork.”

Local residents and scientists said that is the general pattern every year at beaches along Orange County’s 42-mile coastline. Stripped of precious sand by the surging tides and pounding surf of Jan. 17 and 18, they have been adequately replenished and are ready for winter.

But there was plenty of concern about replenishment last January, as record high tides and waves up to 20 feet exacted damage from Huntington Beach to San Clemente, including:

* The last 250 feet of the Huntington Beach Pier, including the End Cafe, were washed away. Structurally weakened, the pier has been closed since.

* In Laguna Beach, the boardwalk at Main Beach was severely undermined. A 12-foot-wide beach in front of the historic Hotel Laguna was washed away.

* In San Clemente, the city’s lifeguard headquarters on the beach north of the pier nearly collapsed as the surf carried away chunks of foundation.

As bad as the tidal pounding was, experts said it could have been worse if another storm of the same intensity had followed. But the Jan. 17-18 storm proved to be Mother Nature’s only serious lashing last winter, sparing the coast from what oceanographer Reinhard Flick said could have been “a major disaster.”

“If there had been a follow-up storm of that magnitude, some beaches would have been wiped out for several years,” said Flick at the Scripps Marine Institution in La Jolla. “That one storm did the work of three or four normal winter storms. We were lucky it wasn’t worse.”

Residents at El Morro generally escaped with little more than a scare. Foundations under about half a dozen mobile homes had to be repaired and reinforced after the storm, but no homes were lost and nobody was hurt.

One look at the beach, though, showed how lucky homeowners had been. A 10-foot layer of sand had been carved away, exposing chunks of concrete and rock. Oceanfront decks, normally a few feet above the beach, suddenly stood 15-18 feet above the sand.

“After a storm like that you swear the beach will never come back,” said Lee Teske, caretaker of the mobile home park. “But look out there now. I’d say that every little granule of sand is back. It’s incredible.”

Southern California beaches are most vulnerable in the winter, the region’s stormy period. Sweeping south out of the Gulf of Alaska, powerful Pacific tempests generate big waves that erode local beaches. But the sand is usually deposited just a few hundred yards offshore. With the passing of winter and the return of smaller waves, generally from the south, the sand is redeposited on beaches.

However, nature’s way has not been entirely successful this year.

In San Clemente, there is some concern because barely enough sand has returned in the pier area, particularly offshore. Marine Safety Capt. Lynn Hughes said the beach “looks in pretty good shape, but that’s misleading.”

A few hundred yards offshore, where almost all beach sand comes from, the bottom is mostly rock, which is not a good sign, he said: “The amount of sand offshore is an indication of the health of a beach. Right now, there should be a lot of it out there, and there isn’t.”