The Sand Berm: A Temporary Fix That Comes Back Every Year, and Who Pays for the Bulldozer

Before September’s swell, crews in Newport Beach were pushing up walls of sand to protect the houses behind, a routine that says a good deal about who a beach is being managed for

Sand Berms and the Cost of Holding the Line

If you visit certain Southern California beaches between November and March, you will find the view of the sea blocked by a ridge of sand ten or fifteen feet high, running parallel to the houses. It was not there in August. It will be gone by May.

This is a winter berm. It is the most widely used form of coastal protection in the state and the one least discussed.

What Happened in September

The berms went up early this year. A Los Angeles television station, reporting on the approach of a large swell over the Labor Day weekend, described crews building sand berms in Newport Beach ahead of the expected high surf, in the same report that covered a cracking seawall in neighbouring Laguna.

The swell arrived. A later summary of the damage along the coast recorded that sand disappeared overnight along parts of the Long Beach Peninsula, where a seawall was compromised and about twenty homes were evacuated.

That account makes the point that matters for what follows. Beaches that have lost sand now have less natural buffer going into a winter that may bring more high surf, and each storm that hits a narrowed beach does more damage than the one before.

How a Berm Works

The principle is simple. Bulldozers scrape sand from the lower beach, near the water, and pile it into a ridge along the upper beach in front of the houses or the road. When large waves come, they expend themselves on the ridge and not on the property behind.

The berm is sacrificial. Waves erode it. After a storm the bulldozers return and push it up again. At the end of the season it is flattened and the beach is restored for summer.

It is cheap compared with a wall. It uses the beach’s own material. It leaves no permanent structure. For those reasons it is often described as a soft alternative to armouring and is generally favoured by regulators over rock or concrete.

The Catch

It is also never finished. A berm is not built once. It is built every year, and sometimes several times in a year. The cost recurs indefinitely.

And it does not add sand. It moves it from one part of the beach to another. A beach that is losing sand overall has less to push each winter. Where the supply has been cut off, as recent reporting has described at Malibu, there comes a point when there is not enough left to make a ridge.

The berm also changes the beach while it stands. For four or five months the public cannot see the ocean from the promenade, the upper beach is a construction site, and the profile of the shore is artificial. For surfers, scraping the lower beach alters the sandbars that shape the waves.

Who Is It For?

This is the question a sceptic of public spending ought to ask.

A berm in front of a row of private houses protects those houses. If the city’s public works department builds it with the city’s bulldozers, the general taxpayer is providing a service whose main beneficiaries are the owners of beachfront property.

Cities offer several justifications. The berm also protects the public street, the sewer, the boardwalk. Flooding of low-lying neighbourhoods affects more than the front row. And the beach itself, which draws visitors and revenue, is part of what is being defended.

Those are fair points. But the distribution of benefit is uneven, and it is seldom spelled out. A resident two miles inland contributes through his taxes to an annual operation that adds a great deal to the security and value of a small number of very expensive homes.

User Pays

The market-minded alternative is to charge those who benefit.

Many cities have the means. A special assessment district can levy a charge on the properties protected, in proportion to their frontage or value. The owners then decide collectively how much protection they want and pay for it.

Some coastal communities do exactly this. It has the merit of honesty. The cost of living on the front row appears on the front row’s bill.

It also changes behaviour. An owner who sees the annual charge rising may think differently about adding a storey, or about how long the house can sensibly remain.

The Objections

The argument is not all one way.

The beach is public. It belongs to everyone, and everyone uses it. Managing it is a core function of a coastal city, like maintaining a park. To charge only the adjacent owners treats a public asset as if it were their private frontage, and may encourage them to think of it that way.

There is a risk in giving beachfront owners control of beach management through a district they fund. They may prefer more protection and less public access than the wider community would choose.

And in older, denser beach neighbourhoods, not every front-row resident is wealthy. Some are tenants. Some are retired people who bought decades ago. An assessment falls on them as well.

The Deeper Issue

The berm is a way of not deciding.

It allows a city to hold the line for another winter without committing to a wall, which regulators would resist, or to retreat, which owners would resist. It can be authorised quickly, often under emergency or routine maintenance provisions. It leaves no trace by June.

Repeated for decades, it amounts to a policy: this shoreline will be defended, at public expense, for as long as there is sand to push. Nobody voted for that policy. It accumulated.

A forecast cited in recent coverage suggests a strong El Nino this winter. If so, the bulldozers will be busy. It would be a good year to ask what the total has been over the past twenty, and who has paid.

What a Sensible Approach Might Include

An annual public account of what berm-building costs, set against what it protects.

A contribution from the properties directly protected, with relief for those on low incomes.

Monitoring of how much sand is left to work with, so that the day the method stops working does not come as a surprise.

And an honest statement from each city of how long it intends to go on.

Temporary measures have their place. A measure that has been temporary every winter for thirty years deserves to be called what it is.

This article draws on published reports of the September events and describes general practice. The London Prat considers the charm of the stopgap in its English satirical news on bulldozing sand and its UK satirical news about a temporary fix made permanent. Bohiney Magazine covers the American shoreline.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/