Can You Plan a Wave? Surf Breaks as Assets in Coastal Engineering

Australia’s Gold Coast builds surfing into its sea defences, California mostly protects access and hopes, and the libertarian has to decide whether a wave should be designed by a committee

Surf Breaks and Coastal Planning

A good wave is an accident. It needs a particular shape of sea floor, a particular angle of swell and a bank of sand or reef in exactly the right place. Change any of those and the wave changes or vanishes.

For most of the history of coastal engineering nobody considered that. Harbours, jetties and seawalls were designed to protect ships and property. If they created a surf spot, as some famously did, it was by chance. If they destroyed one, nobody recorded it.

That is beginning to change, and the change raises a question worth some thought. Should government be in the business of designing waves?

Two Approaches

A recent report on erosion at Malibu draws a contrast between California and Queensland. It describes the Gold Coast’s approach as burying hard protection beneath a beach it commits to maintaining, and folding surf outcomes into coastal planning, to the point of designing an artificial reef with surfing as a central aim.

The same report quotes an Australian coastal engineer noting that the surfing at one celebrated point was apparently excellent during a recent event. The implication is that a managed coast can produce good waves on purpose.

California, by the report’s account, has not gone that way. It says that in Malibu the state is still dropping emergency rock and hoping.

The article also records what California does do. It notes that the Coastal Commission has protected surfing for decades, mostly by protecting access, and gives an example: a permit for a seawall about a mile long at Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz carried conditions requiring future effects on the surf break to be analysed.

What a Surf Analysis Looks Like

The public file for that Santa Cruz matter gives a flavour. A submission to the Commission from a consulting coastal geologist includes a section headed as a surf impact analysis, addressing whether armouring the bluff would affect offshore surfing at Pleasure Point.

It explains the mechanics in plain terms. Surfing there is good because of wave refraction, the bending of wave fronts as they meet the shape of the sea bed. Waves break where the depth is in a certain proportion to their height, so larger waves break further out. The break, it argues, sits well offshore of the bluff.

Whatever one makes of the conclusion, the fact of the document is notable. A permit applicant felt obliged to show, with diagrams, that a wall would not harm a wave. Thirty years ago nobody would have asked.

The Case for Treating Waves as Assets

There is a hard-headed argument for this which has nothing to do with sentiment.

A quality surf break generates economic activity. Visitors come for it. Shops, schools, cafes and rentals depend on it. Property nearby is worth more. Studies in several countries have put the annual value of individual well-known breaks in the millions.

An asset of that value which nobody owns and nobody accounts for will be damaged by accident. That is what happens to unpriced things. Requiring an engineer to consider the wave is simply requiring that a known cost be counted.

From there it is a short step to the Gold Coast position. If you are going to move sand and build structures anyway, why not do it in a way that makes the surf better and not worse?

The Sceptic’s Reply

A person wary of central planning has reasonable doubts.

Artificial surf reefs have a mixed record. Several built around the world at considerable public expense failed to produce the promised wave, and some were later removed. Waves are sensitive to small differences in the bottom, and the sea rearranges the bottom constantly. Designing one is harder than drawing it.

There is also the question of who decides. A reef tuned for one kind of surfing may be useless for another. Longboarders, shortboarders, beginners and swimmers want different things from the same stretch of water. Once a public body is choosing, it is choosing between them, and the choice will be lobbied.

And there is the matter of what surfing is. An earlier article on this site described the line-up as a working commons, governed by custom and not by statute. A wave that exists because an agency built it and maintains it is a different sort of thing. It has a budget, a liability policy and, sooner or later, rules.

A Middle Position

The distinction worth holding on to is between protecting and producing.

To require that a new seawall or harbour works not destroy an existing break is a modest demand. It asks only that one party not damage something of value to others. That is consistent with any theory of property. It is the same principle as not draining your neighbour’s pond.

To have government set out to manufacture surf is a larger undertaking, with the risks that attend any public enterprise: cost overruns, disappointing results, capture by the best-organised users.

That need not rule it out. Where public money is already being spent on sand and structures, designing them with waves in mind may cost little extra and return a good deal. The Gold Coast evidently thinks so. But it should be judged as an investment, with the failures counted as well as the successes.

The Private Alternative

There is, of course, another way to produce a designed wave: build a pool. An earlier article examined the patent disputes among companies doing exactly that. Those ventures risk their own capital and charge their own customers. If the wave is poor, the investors lose, not the taxpayer.

The ocean is not a pool, and nobody will privatise Malibu. But the comparison is a useful discipline. A public project to improve a wave should be able to say what it will cost, who will benefit and what happens if it does not work.

What California does at present, by the account quoted above, is neither protect consistently nor plan deliberately. It reacts. That is the one approach with no defenders.

This article relies on a published report and a public planning document, and sets out both the case for and against. The London Prat considers the engineering of pleasure in its English satirical news on artificial reefs and its UK satirical news about planning a wave. Bohiney Magazine covers the American beaches.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/