In Ventura, a retreat in the face of a rising sea

Tony Barboza in the Los Angeles Times: At Surfers Point in Ventura, California is beginning its retreat from the ocean. Construction crews are removing a crumbling bike path, ripping out a 120-space parking lot and laying down sand and cobblestones. By pushing the asphalt 65 feet inland, the project is expected to give the wave-ravaged point 50 more years of life.

The effort by the city of Ventura is the most vivid example to date of what may lie ahead in California as coastal communities come to grips with rising sea levels and worsening coastal erosion. As the coastline creeps inland, scouring sand from beaches or eating away at coastal bluffs, landowners will increasingly be forced to decide whether to spend vast sums of money fortifying the shore or give up and step back.

State officials say the $4.5-million project in Ventura is the first of its kind in California and could serve as a model for threatened sites along the coast. "Managed retreat, as it's called, is one of the things that we're going to have in our quiver to deal with sea-level rise and increasing storms," said Sam Schuchat, executive officer of the California Coastal Conservancy, which helped fund the Surfers Point project.

…For years, the preferred solution to an eroding shoreline has been to build sea walls or dump imported sand to serve as a buffer. About one-third of the Southern California coastline and about 10% of the shore statewide have been fortified with sea walls and other hard structures.

Although artificial barriers may protect property in the short term, they often intensify the effect of waves, leaving beaches stripped of sand until they narrow or disappear, permanently altering surf patterns. As a result, beach-armoring projects are increasingly out of favor with environmentalists and coastal regulators….

A fisherman at the Ventura Pier, shot by Randy, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license