Surfside

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.

This is the season when residents of beachfront communities start worrying about the weather. Even if the rainy season does not cause leaks in the roof, there is always the chance a storm will sweep the beach out to sea and present a different kind of threat to a house. In the Seal Beach section known as Surfside, the nervousness understandably has increased. A project to add more than a million cubic yards of sand to the beach was postponed last year and is late starting this year.

The panoramic view from John Kriss' balcony has given him endless hours of gorgeous sunsets over the blue Pacific. But the ocean that provides Kriss and other Surfside residents such visual pleasure has also eroded their beach down to the bare rock. Residents are worried whether a $7.

Alan Redhead playfully challenged some customers recently to guess the volume of peanuts, crab and clam chowder consumed at Gladstone's, his popular Pacific Palisades restaurant. For the record, the answers are: 30,000 peanuts, 200 pounds of crab and 1,000 bowls of clam chowder per day. Such tallies are one reason Gladstone's is the top-grossing restaurant in the state. Just three years ago, Gladstone's was suffering declining sales.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote Tuesday on whether to approve spending $474,000 to help pay for a federal beach protection project for four communities, including Surfside. "It looks like everything is falling into place," said Eugene "Gino" Salegui, a Surfside resident who spent an anxious winter worrying that storms and high tides would erode the fragile beach and flood homes.

Surfside's sand-starved beach will finally get its fill. In September, workers will dump 1.6 million cubic yards of sand--nearly 100,000 truckloads--on the Orange County shore, extending the beach about 300 yards from oceanfront houses; now, only a 15- to 30-feet stretch of beach remains. Throughout the winter, residents in the private community had worried that storm-whipped waves and high tides would crash past a makeshift barrier and flood homes.

Officials in this seaside community see the city beach as an hourglass where the sands are rapidly running out--to sea. With waves lapping only 50 feet from Surfside Drive, the city is redoubling lobbying efforts to persuade federal officials that the sand replenishment program--which keeps the beach intact--must be moved up from its usual November start date to prevent significant erosion.

Huntington Beach, a.k.a. "Surf City," would certainly prefer to be known for its waves rather than its skinheads, and for that matter so would the rest of Orange County. Nevertheless, despite observations of experts that hatemongering is a nationwide phenomenon, Huntington Beach keeps finding itself with an outsized public-relations problem that won't go away.

Surfside's makeshift beach barrier held through another 7-foot high tide Friday, but the oceanfront community faces another test this weekend, when more big tides and a storm are expected. At Friday morning's high tide, the gentle surf took the kick out of waves, which failed to hit the barrier of sand bags, boulders, a sand berm and rock wall. In December, two 7.1-foot high tides shot waves over the barrier toward homes on Surfside's eroded beach but caused no damage.