OCEANSIDE — For the second straight summer, a local beach restoration advocacy group is bringing students down to the beach to help educate others on the future of the city’s shoreline and learn what it takes to measure what’s left of the sand there.
Save Oceanside Sand, or SOS Oceanside, was formed five years ago by locals who shared concerns about the city’s beaches losing excessive amounts of sand.
The nonprofit group actively engages the city regarding beach issues and monitors sand levels along Oceanside’s shoreline in partnership with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Last summer, the group kicked off its first summer internship program with students from local high schools to show them the ropes and help spread the word about what the city is doing to address its sand problem.
This summer, six interns from Oceanside and El Camino high schools — Isabella Tinoco, Jaycie Fredrickson, Isabella Hernandez, Saige Finlan Garcia, Sarah Anderson and Emma Myrick — will spend part of their summer at the SOS beachfront pop-up educating others and encouraging them to sign up for the organization’s newsletter.
The interns will also walk the city’s 3.7 miles of shoreline to learn how to measure sand, a distance Ashton said is nearly doubled after walking from the beach into the water to measure the sand height.
Some of the students said they signed up for the internship program because they love the beach and are interested in the sciences.
“I grew up on the beach. As the years have gone by, I’ve seen less and less sand on the beaches,” said Emma Myrick. “My teacher told me about this cool experience, so I signed up.”
While in school, Myrick learned how sand dredging works and studied the pros and cons of installing groins on the beach to trap sand, which helped pique her interest in maintaining sand.
Ashton hopes to continue broadening the students’ horizons and build on their love for their coastal home by focusing on educational efforts to save the city’s sand.
“We thought it was a great way to engage them in what’s happening on the coast,” said SOS President and CEO Bob Ashton. “The whole idea is to get these young minds and hearts exposed to what’s going on on our shoreline, to help them understand the power of the ocean and what it does, and to help educate others.”
Sand constantly flows 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 that sand is quickly swept away southward, leaving barren, rocky shores behind.
Earlier this year, the City Council chose to move forward with Australian firm International Coastal Management’s proposal to install a “living speed bump” with rounded headlands that have dune vegetation on top to stabilize sand on the back beach and an offshore artificial reef to impede nearshore erosive forces.
The proposal was one of three options that a jury selected as part of the RE:BEACH competition to determine the best solution for Oceanside’s beaches.
