OCEANSIDE — As the city gears up to launch its design competition to address coastal erosion, the local group that kickstarted the mission to save the city’s beaches is celebrating its four-year anniversary.
Save Oceanside Sand, also known as SOS Oceanside, was first formed by residents Dirk Ackema, Bob Walker and Nick Ricci in May 2019 due to their concerns about Oceanside beaches losing excessive amounts of sand.
Sand is constantly flowing both from land into the ocean and southward along the coast.
However, the construction of the Camp Pendleton Boat Basin in 1942 and the Oceanside Small Craft Harbor in 1963 has caused sand to become trapped to the north of the harbor, limiting sediment inputs into the local littoral cell, an area of the coastline where sand enters the ocean and flows down the coast.
This prevents Oceanside beaches from being replenished by sand from up-coast resources.
Although the city replenishes its beaches with sand dredged from the harbor annually, all of that sand is quickly swept away southward, leaving barren, rocky shores behind.
The group grew in numbers not long after forming. Its leading members, which soon included President and CEO Bob Ashton, began pressing the City Council to officially join the effort in saving Oceanside’s sand.
“We want to protect and restore the beaches,” Ashton said. “We’re a beach town – it’s our way of life.”
In 2020, the city conducted a year-long engineering evaluation and feasibility study to identify issues in its current coastal management systems as well as potential solutions to lessen the long-term beach erosion effects.
The city is now in its second phase of the Sand Nourishment and Retention Pilot Project, a somewhat controversial project that received backlash from southern cities, including Carlsbad, Encinitas, Solana Beach and Del Mar, regarding the potential implementation of groins and other hard structures on Oceanside beaches that would block sand from moving south.
Walker noted that the city took steps to re-evaluate its plans for the project to avoid negatively impacting southerly beach communities.
We don’t want to stop sand migration from heading south,” Walker said.
As part of the project’s second phase, a design competition is planned to find innovative ways to retain sand along Oceanside’s coast, particularly in areas south of the pier where local beaches are hit by sand erosion the hardest.
The city recently named 10 voting jury members to the design competition, along with five non-voting advisory members.
Ashton was named as one of the jury members along with Del Mar City Councilmember Dwight Worden, who also chairs the SANDAG Shoreline Preservation Working Group.
Other notable jury members include Chris Abad, director of Oceanside Boardrider’s Club; Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at the Marine Institute of UC Santa Barbara and former executive director of the California Coastal Commission; and Lesley Ewing, former senior coastal engineer for the California Coastal Commission.
Three design teams will be selected from a pool of experienced firms to participate in the eight-month competition. These firms will be selected by the city in June, and their designs will be voted by the jury in December before being brought to the City Council for final consideration in January 2024.
Teams will be encouraged to use nature-based features that use a mix of sand retention strategies that could include but are not limited to dunes, cobble berms, headlands and reefs.
The winning team will receive $100,000 and will continue to work on the final permitted design with the hopes of being shovel-ready by the fall of 2025.
“As the pilot project Phase 2 design competition gets underway, it is encouraging to see that sand nourishment and retention components must be designed to work hand-in-hand mitigating a myriad of potential issues such as impacts to surfing, downdrift beaches and other critical design criteria,” Ashton said. “Sand retention will not only make the nourishment events last longer, it will have ripple down positive effects on shoreline habitat, safe beach access, sand for recreation and overall coastal resilience for a beach city across the board.”
In addition to the design competition, the second phase also includes finding an offshore sand source that is easier to excavate and replenish the beaches with sand.
SOS also had a hand in pushing the city to move forward with hiring a coastal zone administrator to oversee all of the work being done on the city’s coastline. Last year, the city hired Jayme Timberlake as its newly established coastal zone administrator. She previously served in the same position for Encinitas.
Walker and Ashton said SOS regularly speaks with Timberlake as well as City Manager Jonathan Borrego about sand issues in Oceanside.
“It’s remarkable to see all the work she’s done,” Ashton said.
As the city moves forward with the project’s second phase, SOS is continuing to grow its reach in the community.
The group continues its monthly measurements of sand movement along Oceanside’s coastline in partnership with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The group is also gearing up to host interns from both Oceanside and El Camino High Schools to participate in sand movement measurements as well.
So far, SOS Oceanside is pending federal approval as a 501c3 nonprofit and has already received approval as a California nonprofit benefit corporation.
“We feel like we’ve accomplished a lot,” Ashton said. “We’ve put a flame under the chairs of the city staff and council by urging them that something needs to be done for our beaches.”
