Coastal erosion is a rampant issue up and down California, and in San Clemente, it’s all but killed the town’s beachbreaks and is having a very real impact on iconic spots at Trestles and San Onofre—among the most utilized surf zones the in United States. This December, a dredging project is being launched to hopefully slow down the loss of sand and maybe even create a few sandbars along the way.

Last July, a study entitled “Critical Erosion Areas,” was released and revealed that in some instances beaches in San Clemente have been losing more than five feet of beach every year since 2001. As the WSL Finals in 2022 at Lowers, with a large south swell in the water, the event’s athlete and VIP infrastructure on the beach had to be abandoned when the surf washed out sand from under the structure’s foundation. At San Onofre, hour long lines exist to get into the State Park, not only because more people are surfing, but because coastal erosion has given dozens of parking spots back to the sea. Once reliably fun breakbreaks are essentially dead zones on the daily.

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In a town with more surfers on the Championship Tour than anywhere in the country, where the world champions have been crowned the last six years, the beaches are disappearing. This is where the Army Corps of Engineers come in. Along with Manson Construction, the contractor for the San Clemente Shoreline Project, they’re going to be pumping over 251,000 cubic yards of sand from off the coast of Oceanside all the way to the San Clemente Pier. As designed now, sand will be dredged to San Clemente beaches every five to six years for the next 50 years. That means that by about 2073 more than 2 million cubic yards of sand will have been relocated to the pier area.

With coastal property and an important railway line increasingly threatened when the tides are high and the surf is up, the goals of the sand replenishment project are to slow down coastal erosion and help reduce damage to infrastructure during storms and big swell events, especially this El Niño winter. But all that sand has to settle somewhere, and as a surfer that means sandbars.

But pumping sand isn’t a permeant solution. Organizations like the Surfrider Foundation and Save Our Beaches San Clemente are pursuing more long-range ideas that will ensure that the new sand that’s being dredged sticks around for awhile. There are a few rough concepts being tossed around now, but no concrete go-forward plan has finalized. Everything from relocating the railroad tracks, to creating a living shoreline, to man-made reefs has all been discussed, but it’s a complicated subject with a lot of various stakeholders and interests to consider.