A 60-year-old outer breakwater wall that protects Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay has helped sustain a fishing industry, liveaboards and recreational users for decades, but it has also contributed to rapid shoreline erosion.
Now, solutions are being explored by two agencies with different approaches.
The San Mateo County Harbor District, which oversees harbor and marina facilities and operations at Pillar Point Harbor and Oyster Point Marina, and OneShoreline, the county’s Flood and Sea Level Rise Resiliency District are focusing on collaboration, transparency and public involvement as they aim for long-term solutions.
The discussion during last Wednesday’s meeting comes after the two agencies had a communication lapse last month when OneShoreline added the Pillar Point Harbor breakwater to its meeting agenda and Harbor District officials felt left out of the loop.
Both agencies have varying concepts for solutions. On one hand, the Harbor District aims to preserve the harbor and its assets by dredging for sand and manually adding it to the south Pillar Point Harbor at Surfers Beach. Lack of natural moving sand has affected the beach and caused severe erosion that will eventually cause infrastructure damage to Highway 1.
“Sand from north of the harbor is prevented from moving south naturally by the outer breakwater,” Harbor District General Manager Jim Pruett said.
On the other hand, with climate change and sea-level rise in its sights, OneShoreline seeks possible solutions that include eradicating or moving the breakwater so that sand can naturally flow down the shoreline.
The key objectives for both agencies is to sustain the long-term viability of the harbor and identify adaptable shoreline protection, Len Materman, chief executive officer of OneShoreline, said.
“I hope our study initiatives result in a serious collaborative planning for climate change. This challenge is too great for us to spend our time and energy on anything less,” said Materman who added the main threat is sea-level rise and atmospheric rivers.
For years, the Harbor District has invested time and resources into a dredging project that would take 100,000 cubic yards of clean sand from the harbor’s east basin and place it on Surfers Beach “to restore habitat and provide a buffer against coastal erosion,” according to the district’s project page.
A recent U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study concluded that the bluffs along Surfers Beach eroded at an average rate of 1.64 feet per year between 1993 and 2012. Powerful storms during the past two winter seasons have resulted in even more severe erosion, causing major threats to Highway 1, Mirada Road and other coastal infrastructure and leading to emergency repairs by Caltrans and the County of San Mateo, according to the staff report.
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More than seven years into looking into the dredging issue and more than $1 million spent, the district is steps away from beginning its project, which was cited as the preferred method for combating erosion in a study conducted by the Army Corps and partly sponsored by the Harbor District.
“The whole issue is how do we move sand from north of the harbor to south of the harbor, from Mavericks [Beach] to Surfers. The wall breakwater interrupts that and everybody knows that,” Pruett said. “[The dredging project] solves the problem of moving the sand from north to south, which is their whole concern — protecting Princeton-by-the-Sea. … That way, we keep the breakwaters where they are at and we keep the harbor a safe refuge.”
If the proposed project is successful, Pruett said the district would expand the pilot project into an annual program, restoring shoreline resiliency while preserving the breakwaters, which were initially built to create a harbor of refuge for a fishing fleet and have since created an area along the coast booming with recreational visitors.
“I support your project to move sand to see how nature will then move it because fighting with nature is increasingly difficult, expensive and energy intensive and we don’t think it’s a long-term solution,” Materman said.
OneShoreline is in the early stages of developing its plan for addressing erosion and unwanted sand accumulation on the coastside. A plan has not yet been fully fleshed out but, Materman said, OneShoreline worked with the same consultant the Harbor District contracts with to develop high-level ideas for modifying parts of the inner breakwaters to naturally redirect sand to areas in need of it including Princeton shoreline and Surfers Beach.
“Everyone agrees that the breakwaters are the problem. The question is, how do we make it not a problem in a way that doesn’t threaten the harbor? That’s the objective, and I think everybody agrees that’s the problem,” Materman said.
The Harbor District project aims to give immediate results hopefully for a few decades while OneShoreline is projecting a long-term solution from 50 to 100 years out, Pruett said.
The Harbor District’s plan is to move forward with its dredging project for immediate action.
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