Anatomy of a SoCal Sand Crisis
Surfers are the frontline observers of our coasts. Whether we realize it or not, we’re the largest network of human intelligence gathering up-to-date data on coastal activity. Back in the late ’80s — long before apps, websites, social media, and surf cams — Surfline’s late, great founder Sean Collins was one of the first to truly leverage this network.
To build his original surf report service, called 976-SURF, Sean leaned on a well-known squad of on-site witnesses at local surf spots. At dawn each day, they answered Sean’s calls to a pay phone adjacent to their assigned surf spot and relayed the relevant info. Callers got reliable eyewitness accounts along with Sean’s expert forecasting analysis — and the game was never the same.
As surfers, we plan our lives around how the wind, swell, and tides will impact our surfing strike zones. But while taking all that in, we inevitably notice other trends impacting our surroundings: river flows, sea life, pollution, erosion.
Today, in many surf towns around the world, one of the most pressing issues is a severe lack of sand, as natural replenishment cycles have been disrupted. San Clemente, a town world-famous for its contribution to surf culture even before it began crowning national, world, and Olympic champions, is a perfect example. In this case study, we’ll dive into its specific issues — but every coastal region faces unique challenges, and San Clemente is hardly alone.
Some Sand History
Since the 1920s, more than 480 beach communities across the country have implemented beach nourishment projects. Combined, they’ve utilized 1.7 billion cubic yards (about 365 Superdomes’ worth) of sand across more than 975 miles of coastline.
The reason is straightforward: beaches power America’s world-leading recreational economy. They’re the biggest recreational attraction by far, generating $520 billion of economic output, $240 billion of direct spending, and $36 billion in tax revenues — four times the tax revenue our National Parks generate. National Park spending is $3.6 billion per year, and deservedly so. But here’s the rub: we only spend $85 million a year on crucial beach nourishment projects.
Naturally, spending money on sand that will eventually be cycled away — barring any special engineering — sounds ludicrous to some. That impulse is understandable, until one does the math. For every dollar spent on beach nourishment, there’s $3,000 in economic output, $1,400 in direct spending, and $200 in taxes.
Smart coastal cities have known this for years. San Clemente, however, is one of many cities playing catch-up. Here’s a look at why.
A Century Ago: When Sand Rivers Were Flowing
About 100 years ago, Duke Kahanamoku, the father of modern-day surfing, was living in California while working in Hollywood. But his favorite getaway from the L.A. scene was down in Corona Del Mar. Back then, the Santa Ana River flowed into Newport’s back bay, and exited at what is now the entrance to Newport Harbor. The sand flowing out of the harbor formed a lengthy Waikiki-peeler at the entrance, and that not only became Duke’s home away from home, it became the first hotbed of surf culture on California’s coast.
Spots like Doheny and San Onofre were yet to be discovered by surfers, partly because there were only a handful, but also because they were rural outposts. South Orange County and the expansive San Juan River watershed sat practically empty, and the river’s many tributaries flowed freely from the coastal Santa Ana Mountains, spreading sediment along a wide floodplain before reaching the ocean near present-day Doheny. When dry, the floodplain was a giant trail of sand.
As the main artery of the San Juan watershed, the San Juan River swelled during winter storms, delivering massive sediment loads into the Capistrano Bight — a six-mile-long embayment protected by Dana Point in the north and Cotton’s Point in the south. That six-mile embayment is home to San Clemente’s littoral cell, which determines the primary pattern of sand flow on its beaches.
Littoral cells are key to understanding beach health, so let’s elaborate a bit: sand is to a littoral cell what water is to a watershed. When sand from a floodplain finally reaches the coast, it’s leaving its watershed and joining a littoral cell — a stretch of coast whose geographical boundaries and features will determine how and where that sand migrates.
San Clemente Pier sits smack in the middle of the San Juan Bight’s embayment. Photo: Klein
Ultimately, all beaches are slow-moving rivers of sand. It can take years, decades, centuries, or millennia for sand to leave a cell, depending on the size, shape, exposure, and boundaries of it. Sand that isn’t trapped by a man-made structure will one day leave its system through leakage, like a deep offshore canyon.
Of course, the more sand there is in a system, the wider its beaches get, creating a natural buffer against the elements. To that end, sand protects sand, because it’s much harder for sand to travel out of a system when the ocean can’t reach it. Healthy beaches have dunes that are rarely reached by the sea, providing natural resilience against storms and rising sea levels.
For much of California, the traditional sand flow pattern is north to south. But the Capistrano Bight is unique, acting like a six-mile-long coastal eddy. Dana Point’s prominent headland is a major obstacle for traveling elements — wind, currents, swell, and sand. What’s more, the Bight’s large, bay-like formation is more exposed to south swells and wind while being shadowed from northern exposure. On the southern boundary, the bathymetry of Cotton’s Point (home to a well-known lefthander) ceaselessly refracts waves north, making it that much harder for sand to leak south.
How Taming Nature Choked the Sand Flow
Before the Spanish arrived in California 250 years ago, the San Juan River watershed looked the same as it had for thousands of years, when only a few hundred native Acjachemen lived in the region. Over the last century, however, the area has undergone a complete ecological transformation.
In 1891, when engineers built the railroad along the coast of what is now San Clemente and Capo Beach, Orange County’s entire population was 13,000. Today, it’s 3.1 million.
San Juan Creek Watershed overdevelopment. Photo: BBOB
Roughly 300,000 people live within the 133 square miles of the San Juan River watershed, the primary source of sand for San Clemente’s littoral cell. Most of these homes were built in the past 50 years, not including San Clemente’s 60,000 residents, who live in a small 18-square-mile watershed fed by coastal streams.
To make way for all these homes, the area was hydraulically reengineered. In the 1930s, during the surge of Depression-era infrastructure projects, the wide floodplain of San Juan Creek was replaced with a narrow concrete channel, and several of its tributary creeks were hardened. In the decades since, more than 80 upstream dams have been installed.
As a result, the natural sand flows from San Juan Creek into the Capistrano Bight slowed dramatically and today are only a fraction of what they once were. Yet it wasn’t until the mid ’90s that anyone along the beach really noticed. That’s because the same littoral cell had been injected with more than 2.8 million cubic yards of sand nourishment between 1964 and 1970, when the Dana Point Harbor and the SONGS nuclear power plant were being constructed.
Armoring a SoCal riverbank — a common site.
Though few in the region realized it, those 1960s nourishment projects kept beaches intact for decades, even as natural deposits dwindled.
But after a long drought in the 1990s, erosion finally became obvious to beachfront property owners in Capo Beach. The ocean began to threaten homes built on dunes that had once sat high and dry. To protect their property, desperate homeowners installed seawalls and riprap, often without realizing that these techniques only made matters worse. Waves reflect violently when they hit hard structures, accelerating erosion in front of and adjacent to hardened barriers.
At that point, the sand nourishment deficit came into sharper focus for residents of Capo Beach. Residents got their hands on 48,000 cubic yards of sand in 2009, which brought some much-needed relief, but numbers gleaned from numerous watershed studies estimate the San Juan River’s annual replenishment rate back when it was depositing sand freely is somewhere near 100,000 cubic yards. The caveat, of course, is that Southern California rain seasons are famously of the feast and famine variety. There are usually several years of no deposits, followed by an massive deposit when an flood seasons (typically El Niño) occur.
The Tipping Point
Sadly, added flood mitigation efforts within the watershed resulted in more sand being trapped behind dams, even during wet seasons. In 2014 Hurricane Marie delivered one of the most memorable south swells in decades across Southern California. Surfers were stoked, but depleted beaches in San Clemente, especially those that had lost their sand buffers, were ravaged. Huge waves at Cottons pulled sand off the beach and swept it north toward T-Street and the Pier. Protective dunes on the south end of State Beach were also scoured.
Cottons, Hurricane Marie. Photo: Klein
Hurricane Marie’s beach-width drop-off.
While San Clemente and Capo Beach responded within a couple of years, adding 77,000 cubic yards between them, the region was still well shy of the balance needed to protect what sand was left. When more huge swells hit in 2020 and 2021, waves easily breached the narrow ribbon of sand remaining at State Beach and Cypress Shores, slammed the riprap protecting the railroad line, and triggered a dangerous feedback loop.
The southern beaches of San Clemente began visibly shrinking.
The same day Gabriel Medina won his third world title at Lower Trestles in 2021, an ancient landslide at Cypress Shores reactivated, partly due to the loss of sand that once stabilized it. The slide displaced rail lines, and waves breached the tracks.
Suddenly, the issue was impossible to ignore. The Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) responded urgently, dropping large volumes of riprap to stop the slide — effectively hard-armoring the coast.
Since then, every major swell has pounded the riprap, displacing the little sand that accumulates and breaking the natural sediment cycle. As expected, beach degradation has accelerated.
Replenish, Rebalance, Restore
Everything about San Clemente’s sand crisis and its systematic collapse was predictable. The American Geological Institute released an earth science series shown in schools across the country back in the late ’60s. One standout episode, “The Beach: A River of Sand,” included an in-depth look at Santa Barbara’s Sandspit — how it was created accidentally and how relentless dredging is now required to keep the harbor entrance intact. But more importantly, it showed how unmitigated inland development destroys beaches by cutting off vital sand supplies. The film’s closing line summed up the solution perfectly:
“So the rivers of sand that move along our coasts are actually parts of a much larger system. Whenever man interferes with such a system, he becomes involved in its operation. To the degree that man upsets the natural balance of the system, he and his machines must do the work that nature did before.”
The City of San Clemente has recognized the value of its beaches and human intervention needed to restore balance. The community is committed to tackling this problem. In 2024, more than 65% voted in favor of an initiative to raise money for ongoing sand replenishment. While it fell just shy of passing (a two-thirds majority was needed), it showed tremendous support on an issue that remains top of mind.
Fortunately, recent sand nourishment efforts have started showing results. The Pier Project added 200,000 cubic yards of sand between the San Clemente Pier and T-Street in the summer of 2024. Another 40,000 cubic yards were placed at North Beach.
As expected, winter windswells moved sand south. While the beach at T-Street narrowed, beaches like Riviera, State Park, and even Cottons gained sand, and wave energy was diverted from the riprap. What’s more, the fresh new sandbars offered some of the best surf in years at breaks many locals had given up for dead. Still, the riprap protecting homes and the rail line remains dangerously close to the surf zone, and one big swell could undo much of the recent progress.
SC beachbreak, post sand replenishment. Photo: Jeremiah Klein