Long Beach offers ideas on reconfiguring its breakwater
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Two miles from downtown Long Beach, where freighters queue up to unload much of the nation’s imported goods, a long wall of rock rises abruptly from the waves, encrusted with mussels and crawling with crabs.
This is the Long Beach Harbor breakwater, a 2.2-mile architectural creation of World War II designed to shield the Navy’s Pacific Fleet from stormy seas and enemy torpedoes.
Today, nearly two decades after the Navy and its ships pulled out of the area, critics contend that the stony barricade is the reason the city’s now surfless beaches are among the least popular and most polluted in the region.
This afternoon, Long Beach released the long-awaited results of a study designed to attract congressional support for a controversial proposal to reconfigure the breakwater to create bigger waves, cleaner water and beaches, and more surf tourism. According to the study, the city could gain $52 million a year in local spending — and $7 million annually in taxes and fees.
Details of the $100,000 study conducted by the engineering firm Moffat & Nichol will be presented to the Long Beach City Council at 5 p.m. Monday. Many civic leaders hope the findings will spur the Army Corps of Engineers, which owns and operates the breakwater, to analyze the feasibility of dismantling part of the barrier to restore ocean currents and the harbor’s ecological balance.
The change, supporters of the proposal say, would revive the city’s historic seaside allure. “The people who want to take it down have noble goals: restoration of waves clean enough to swim in and the kind of frolicking and big seaside hotels that existed here in the 1930s,” said Laurie Manny, a Realtor in Long Beach. “On the other side are homeowners who imagine 20-foot waves barreling in during an El Nino year and nothing out there to stop them.”
Officials said the project will not happen unless daunting challenges can be overcome. Major concerns include how altering the breakwater would affect navigation into the adjacent ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and the offshore loading of explosive weaponry onto Navy ships.
Then there are the area’s oil islands, one of which was destroyed by heaving seas during a storm in 1983.
“Resolving those issues,” said Russell Boudreau, principal coastal engineer for Moffat & Nichol, “will be far more challenging than moving breakwater rocks around.”
Complete removal of the breakwater is not recommended in the study as a feasible option because the myriad negative impacts that would trigger could not be mitigated in a cost-effective manner. Instead, it offers five options, including three for reconfiguring the breakwater. They range in cost from about $10 million to as much as $310 million.
—Louis Sahagun in Long Beach