Sea Walls

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.

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.

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.

WASHINGTON - An overwhelming majority of Americans is convinced that sea level rise resulting from climate change poses a significant threat to the United States and coastal communities should invest in preparing for the risks, according to a survey released Thursday by Stanford University. The study was conducted with memories still fresh of Hurricane Sandy's vast damage and protracted, expensive rebuilding, whose cost was picked up largely by taxpayers. Although past surveys have asked Americans if they accept climate change to be a global reality, the survey by Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment focuses on attitudes about one of its effects - sea level rise - and the options to deal with it. The responses, taken together, indicated that most Americans were no longer willing to accept a hands-off approach to continued coastal development that will get battered repeatedly by rising seas.

Take a few rotting sea walls and toss in the ocean's natural tendency to erode anything in its path. Add one state bureaucracy. Stir in 94 property owners, more than a dozen insurance companies and about 30 attorneys. Bring to a boil. The ingredients add up to a lot of confusion, a long-simmering legal battle and, for many of the Las Tunas Beach residents, an ill-tasting and costly settlement to replace the group of deteriorating sea barriers near their Malibu oceanfront homes.

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.

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?

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 the 42-year-old wall 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.

SCITUATE, Mass. - For much of the Northeast, Sunday was a day to shovel out, thaw out and prepare for the workweek. But Anne Coppola's family and dozens of others had just begun to feel the effects of one of the worst storms to pummel New England in decades. Coppola and her husband, daughter, two cats and dog were among hundreds of people huddled in a high school in Scituate, about 30 miles southeast of Boston. The whole town had lost power and was unlikely to get it back for days.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy 's devastation, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday that the city needed to prepare for “the new realities” of rising sea levels and laid out his vision -- one that could include levees. “Let me be clear: We are not going to abandon the waterfront,” said Bloomberg, who had expressed his concern about global warning in the days following the superstorm. “We are not going to leave the Rockaways or Coney Island or Staten Island's South Shore.  But we can't just rebuild what was there and hope for the best.

As coastal areas of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut are just drying out from horrific flooding prompted by Hurricane Sandy, more watery disaster has struck 4,200 miles away in Italy. Following torrential rains, Venice is experiencing unusually bad flooding. It's the fourth time floods have exceeded norms there since 2000. One of the world's great artistic treasures, the low-lying city of lagoons on the Adriatic Sea experiences problems from high waters every winter. Especially around St. Mark's Square, many of its Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance buildings are regularly flooded.

NEW YORK - A nor'easter that threatens to lash the mid-Atlantic states with freezing rain, snow and high winds appeared to be weakening in the Atlantic Ocean, but still could cause new flooding and power outages and hamper recovery efforts in areas that suffered the brunt of Superstorm Sandy last week. The new storm is far smaller than Sandy, but officials fear low-lying areas in New Jersey and southern New York are vulnerable because Sandy destroyed so many sand dunes and other natural barriers, as well as man-made sea walls and jetties, that normally limit damage from high storm surges.

LITTLE EGG HARBOR, N.J. -- Voters in the New York metropolitan area went to the polls on Tuesday, wary about an upcoming storm and many  still grappling with the damage caused by Sandy just over a week ago. The initial turnout was high in storm-hit areas where many people arrived at makeshift polling sites like the recreational vehicle parked in Little Egg Harbor. Ruth Ann Murray, 75, was staying in a shelter there after her home in Manahawkin was flooded--and has never missed an election.

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.

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.

Rescue workers continued to search Monday for victims of a powerful weekend storm that combined with high spring tides to batter France's Atlantic coast, killing at least 62 people in Western Europe. By Monday evening 51 deaths had been reported in France. Most of the victims drowned in their homes early Sunday morning, officials said. At least 11 more people died in other Western European nations as a result of the storm named Xynthia. Warnings had been issued by Friday evening in France for people to stay off beaches and coastal roads, but hundreds were surprised in their homes in the middle of the night by surging waters that smashed through aging sea walls.

Is global warming to blame for Sandy the "Frankenstorm"? Pundits and politicians were arguing about that even before the massive storm struck the Atlantic coast; now that it has moved on, after killing 50, flooding the New York subway system, ripping away chunks of New Jersey's coastline and causing myriad other damage that will place Sandy among the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history, it's a more pressing question. After all, if the storm were an act of man rather than an act of God, we might be able to prevent such disasters from recurring.

It's not just about the polar bears anymore. There was a time when the conversation about global warming was dominated by news about the Arctic, where its effects are the most easily visible to the lay public. The narrative involved shrinking glaciers and the ferocious white bears that live part of their lives on drifting ice floes that now are melting. But polar bears are far away and ice is just, well, ice. So it would be a good idea for the public - and especially Southern Californians - to pay rapt attention to several reports published within the last couple of weeks that bring the reality of climate change from the polar ice caps to our backyard.