SEAL BEACH — Surfside residents who feared they'd have to wait until January for their badly eroded beach to be repaired have convinced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take more immediate action to protect their coastal homes.
The corps awarded a $7.7-million sand replenishment contract to a New Jersey dredging company in September to build up the rocky strip of beach before high tides and the winter storm season arrive and threaten the half-dozen homes at the northern tip of the Surfside colony.
At first, the dredging company, Weeks Marine Inc., planned to sail a dredger from the East Coast to California and begin dredging by late this month or early December, in time to build up the beach before the storm season.
To the dismay of increasingly anxious homeowners, the contractor changed plans by hiring a West Coast dredging company that wouldn't begin work until January.
"If they're going to wait that long, that would leave us up the creek without a paddle," Surfside resident John Kriss said.
However, residents protested the delay to the Corps of Engineers, which decided to start trucking in sand to get the beach restoration project going until Weeks Marine arrives to continue the work.
Mona Goss, a corps spokeswoman in Los Angeles, said that within the next couple of weeks, heavy equipment including front loaders, trucks and bulldozers will start moving sand from a wide area of beach south of Surfside in the unincorporated Orange County community of Sunset Beach.
About 150,000 cubic yards of sand will be relocated to help build a platform for the dredging pipeline at Surfside and also to provide protection until the entire project is completed, Goss said.
The corps' decision to start bringing in sand to replenish the barren beach has pleased Surfside's worried residents.
"We've got a very serious beach erosion problem here," said Surfside's community president Roger Kuppinger. "We're very happy it's being done for protection from winter storms."
Already, residents have been forced to remove playground equipment on the beach after large breakers threatened to wash it away.
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Weeks Marine has five months to dredge 1.6 million cubic yards of sand and pump it onto Surfside's beach. The project also calls for the company to move 140,000 cubic yards of sand from the mouth of the Santa Ana River with earth movers and deposit it along the Newport Beach shoreline.
