Erosion has closed portions of The Great Highway. Photo: Alison Hawkes.
A California panel has rejected San Francisco’s emergency solution to controlling erosion on Ocean Beach. The California Coastal Commission ruled that the city couldn’t use boulders to buffer the shoreline along the Great Highway from pounding ocean waves because doing so would harm sensitive habitat. Instead, the city must find a long term solution to protecting the coast and important sewage pipelines. San Francisco is now forced to move quickly on a blueprint for the beach’s future. In other coastal news, a U.S. Geological Survey found that waves along the Pacific Coast in 2009-2010 were 20 percent stronger than any year since 1997 causing erosion at “unprecedented levels.” During the time, the ocean encroached 184 feet onto Ocean Beach and pummeled 30-foot high bluffs on a section of Highway 1, causing a section to collapse. The force behind that year’s damaging storms was the El Niño climate pattern. [Read more - San Francisco Chronicle Beach, San Francisco Examiner, and Contra Costa Times].
