Malibu beachfront homes vulnerable as sand sources run dry Play

Beachfront landowners in Malibu need sand to protect their houses. Dozens of oceanfront homes are in danger — the Labor Day surf and tide disaster left them vulnerable to the next big storm.

Tuesday, the city held an El Niño preparedness meeting. Sand was the big request. Sand that cannot be trucked in. Sand that cannot be dredged from offshore.

The sand that nourishes Malibu's beaches comes out of the mountains during big rainstorms. That natural cycle also carries rocks, trees and all sorts of debris. And it gets stuck crossing Pacific Coast Highway.

At the city's El Niño brainstorming session Tuesday at City Hall, some residents asked Caltrans to stop carting off that sand and debris to the dump.

Coastal engineer Reg Brown, who lives in Malibu, asked the Caltrans engineer whether the state could dump that sand and debris on the beach.

"During this El Niño storm coming up, how can we allow that debris — and I'm talking about sand and gravel, mud and everything — to be thrown away?" Brown said. "I know that if Caltrans put everything in the dump truck and takes it out to Malibu point in the ocean, you're gonna get homeowners up and down the beach yelling at you, 'why you dirty up the beach?' They don't realize that's where that stuff is supposed to go."

Caltrans engineer Joon Kang responded that the state will be stockpiling debris from PCH along the highway this winter. But there are no plans to dump storm debris in the ocean. And certainly no permits for that.

The state has only one answer for temporarily protecting its sections of Highway 1 that are in danger. Rocks.

"Huge boulders — we put them out," Kang said. "I know the Coastal Commission hates them because it takes away from the footage of the beach. But we do put them as a temporary repair. If you can somehow backfill that under your house or in front of your house with huge boulders — these are temporary repairs, but they do soak up this ocean wave energy."

So a question from a homeowner: where do we get these rocks?

"Caltrans gets these boulders from Catalina Island and other quarries to put them in there," Kang said. "We are using loads and loads of these boulders. They do soak up the energy of the wave. Coastal Commission hates it. They do not like rock structural protections. However, it works, so we use that as an emergency repair. Just a suggestion."

The city's chief building official, Yolanda Bundy, was sitting right next to the Caltrans official. And she could hardly wait to break in.

"Juun, I think we need to be careful on stating that boulders are going to protect people's homes. I want to be transparent to everybody. We are working with our engineers and the coastal engineers to determine what is appropriate in immediate reports and what needs to be done. So I just want to clarify that," Bundy said.

Plus, the Coastal Commission views rocks as emergency steps only. Typically, they demand that emergency rock protections be removed with a permanent solution as soon as possible after the emergency is over.

The permanent solution is sand, says city manager Joe Irvin. But there is no sand. There is no source of sand for the government to move in like some cities in Orange County are doing. Frankly, they have run out of sand also.

Another big issue brought up at the Tuesday meeting by beachfront residents was what to do about debris battering their wooden piers. Decks and stairways are falling into the ocean, and wooden poles are floating around in the tossing surf. They act like battering rams against houses.

"In 50 years of watching seawalls fail, not one has failed by being overtopped," Brown said. "They all failed from being undermined due to erosion, sucking out the backfill. Now, if you have a wood seawall, there's nothing behind it. So if waves or a portion of the Malibu pier comes in, it's like a torpedo, and it breaks the wood."

Residents asked the city, the county, anyone, for help pulling these torpedoes out of the water between high tides. There is no agency doing that.

And as for the city or the county or the Army bringing in sand to place in front of houses — realistically, that is not going to happen.

The county cannot find a quick sand source for Westward Beach and Zuma Beach. Broad Beach homeowners have spent millions of dollars trying to import sand, and after 15 years have nothing to show for their great expense.

Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of beachfront houses in Malibu are in danger. The ones that did not burn may face managed retreat, or worse.