Sea Wall

SEA GATE, N.Y. -- Michael Szajngarten stopped picking up pieces of his shattered home to look through the hole Hurricane Sandy ripped in his living room wall, giving him an unobstructed ocean view. “I hear we'll get snow soon,” he said.  “I just feel like it's insult to injury.” Just outside were remnants of a concrete sea wall, a barrier built to protect homes here from high surf and storm surge. But super storm Sandy crushed parts of the wall, and a new storm -- a nor'easter -- is brewing in the Atlantic, threatening to hit the coast again.

The dining room at Old Tony's is a testament to its status as a survivor. Its aging green carpets and tan leather booths have overlooked Redondo Beach Pier for more than 60 years. Inside, not much has changed. The tiki bar and musty-gray fishing nets hanging from the ceiling are the kitsch of decades past, and some of the waitresses have been around since the Nixon administration. In its heyday, throngs of visitors packed the pier, even on weekdays, catching movies at the stately Fox theater or fishing off the horseshoe-shaped pier.

It's a trade-off, living on Naples. In exchange for inhabiting an island with quaint canals where kayakers, paddlers and opera-singing gondoliers float past million-dollar homes, residents of this Long Beach neighborhood live with the anxiety of knowing that the only thing protecting their property from the ocean is a crumbling sea wall. "If the sea wall fails, we're in real trouble," said Bob Fletcher, a retired lawyer who has experienced the sinking feeling of spotting ocean water seeping under the floorboards of his Spanish-style home on Rivo Alto Canal.

No cause of death has yet been determined for a 54-year-old Chula Vista man who died while scuba diving off La Jolla Shores Beach, according to the San Diego County medical examiner. Lawrence Yates was found by lifeguards floating face-down Saturday afternoon near the south end of the beach. He may have been trapped against a sea wall, according to lifeguards. Yates was taken to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, where he was pronounced dead. ALSO: High temperatures set records, more heat on the way Police pursue triple-slaying suspect in remote forestland Town reels after Leila Fowler's brother is accused of killing her tony.perry@latimes.com

The Rancho Palos Verdes City Council, sitting as the Redevelopment Agency, is seeking funds to construct a sea wall to help stabilize the Portuguese Bend landslide. "We figure it will cost $20 million" to build a retaining wall to protect the shoreline, agency Chairwoman Jacki Bacharach said. The most likely sources of funds for the sea wall are the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

A series of sharp, twisted spikes jut out from the sand along Las Tunas Beach in Malibu, a jarring sight against a background of rising waves and gliding birds. The spikes are the only remnants of a rotting sea wall built to protect the beach, but to people like homeowner Kurt Simon, they represent a lengthy, bitter battle over property rights, access to public beaches and, ultimately, majority rule versus individual choice.

The dining room at Old Tony's is a testament to its status as a survivor. Its aging green carpets and tan leather booths have overlooked Redondo Beach Pier for more than 60 years. Inside, not much has changed. The tiki bar and musty-gray fishing nets hanging from the ceiling are the kitsch of decades past, and some of the waitresses have been around since the Nixon administration. In its heyday, throngs of visitors packed the pier, even on weekdays, catching movies at the stately Fox theater or fishing off the horseshoe-shaped pier.

Talk about an impregnable fortress: Good luck trying to damage the Naval Air Weapons Station. The place bristles with advanced missiles. Eye-in-the-sky Hawkeye E-2s zoom overhead. Sentries patrol the gates. The only real threat is the ordinarily placid Pacific on the base's western boundary. But what a foe it is proving to be. The eternal sloshing of tides gobbles about 4 feet of shoreline annually. Violent El Nino-driven storms lashed the base with huge waves this past winter.

Some of the sandy beaches that made Hawaii famous are gradually washing out to sea, deflected by walls designed to armor beachfront homes against the rising tides. After years of winking at the problem, and even building sea walls itself, the state is changing its tune. "Sea walls and revetments built on these coasts have produced an epidemic of beach loss on Oahu and Maui," said Mike Wilson, director of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.

With erosion gnawing at 85% of California's coastline, state officials are proposing steps to reduce building of sea walls and other shoreline armoring that tend to accelerate the loss of sand. The California Resources Agency, in its first proposed revision of statewide coastal erosion policies in 23 years, suggests that arming the coast to protect seaside houses be considered only as the last option.

SOLANA BEACH, Calif. - As befits its name, issues of sand and surf loom large in this seaside community north of San Diego. For more than three decades, controversy has surrounded the proliferation of privately built sea walls meant to protect bluff-top homeowners along the city's approximately 1.7 miles of oceanfront. Property owners say the walls are the only way to keep the pounding waves from inexorably undercutting the tall bluffs and imperiling their pricey homes. Environmentalists view the sea walls - built on public and private property - as abominations that shrink the beach and place private interests above the right of the public to enjoy the coast.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - Hundreds of thousands of children finally went back to school Monday and New York slogged through a full-fledged commute - but the Northeast kept one eye on its halting recovery, the other on a you-can't-be-serious second storm that could bring high winds and flooding to communities already staggered by Sandy. "Insult to injury," said Michael Szajngarten, as he sorted through his battered home in the seaside community of Sea Gate, just down the road from the Coney Island boardwalk.

SEA GATE, N.Y. -- Michael Szajngarten stopped picking up pieces of his shattered home to look through the hole Hurricane Sandy ripped in his living room wall, giving him an unobstructed ocean view. “I hear we'll get snow soon,” he said.  “I just feel like it's insult to injury.” Just outside were remnants of a concrete sea wall, a barrier built to protect homes here from high surf and storm surge. But super storm Sandy crushed parts of the wall, and a new storm -- a nor'easter -- is brewing in the Atlantic, threatening to hit the coast again.

SHAH BANDAR, Pakistan - In his dreams, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari sees a spectacular metropolis rising up from the vast stretches of mangrove swamp and sea-salted wasteland along the mighty Indus River Delta. High-speed rail zips people from place to place. Vacationers soak up the South Asian sun at seaside resorts. Universities, factories and a new seaport pump vitality into the region. Miles of bike lanes crisscross the city, whose population would eventually reach 10 million.

ASHAROKEN, N.Y. -- When James Zima built his dream house on a small cove facing Long Island Sound back in 1978, he studied storm records and built his cedar plank home on stilts, 2 feet above the highest storm surge in the previous 100 years. Super storm Sandy brought the water within 18 inches of his floorboards Monday night. That's when he ran uphill to a neighbor's house. "I barely survived it," said Zima, 61, a lean and taughtly built man with wisps of white hair. On Thursday, he had just finished raking a 2-foot mat of sea grass off his lawn.

The California Coastal Commission was on a mission to find out what's keeping the public from some of the state's most desirable beaches. On a rare bus tour of the Malibu coast this month, officials stopped to inspect gates that were once locked, peered at fake "no parking" signs residents used to ward off beachgoers and even stumbled upon a movie shoot hogging all the parking at the glitzy beach town's pier. But perhaps most noteworthy was what the commissioners didn't see: more than 20 pathways to the beach that were set aside on paper — some of them decades ago — but have yet to be built, depriving people of the opportunity to get to the shore.

Gov. Gray Davis has vetoed funds to rebuild a sea wall that protects the Seal Beach Pier and surrounding shoreline from erosion, alarming city officials who fear that the 42-year-old structure will crumble within a year. The wave-battered wall, just north of the pier, represents Seal Beach's first line of defense against erosion that has been slowly eating away the city's beaches for decades.

For years, beachgoers and environmentalists have worried that wealthy residents of Malibu's exclusive Broad Beach wanted to fence off their 1.1-mile oceanfront to outsiders. Now, in the latest chapter of the shoreline saga, Broad Beach property owners, who include such celebrities as Pierce Brosnan, Goldie Hawn and Steven Spielberg, are building an 8-foot-high rock sea wall that they say is needed to protect their showplace homes from rising ocean water. Workers have begun constructing the 4,100-foot-long wall by lifting boulders by crane over the tops of homes.

For years, San Francisco's Ocean Beach has been under assault by such powerful surf that a fierce winter storm can scour away 25 feet of bluff in just days. The startling pace of the erosion near the San Francisco Zoo has compelled the city to spend $5 million to shore up the crumbling bluffs. The strategy has been simple: drop huge rocks and mounds of sand to protect the nearby Great Highway and the sewer pipes underneath from being destroyed by the crashing waves. But as the enormous rocks have piled up, adding to a jumble of concrete — chunks of curb and bits and pieces of gutters — from parking lots that have tumbled onto the shore, so too have the demands that the city get rid of it all and let the coastline retreat naturally.

Structural engineer Kit Miyamoto was giving a speech in Japan on earthquake safety when this month's record quake struck, giving him a front-row seat for the unfolding disaster and what steps might save lives next time. "This disaster basically paralyzed the whole country," said Miyamoto, president of West Sacramento-based Miyamoto International, standing amid the wreckage in this battered coastal city. "We can learn a lot of lessons for California. " What worked, and what didn't?