ST Winter 2023 - Flipbook - Page 17
San Mateo County Harbor District
Plans for addressing Coastal
Erosion and Shoaling
By Jim Pruett, JD, Capt. (USCG (Retired)), General Manager, San Mateo
County Harbor District
The San Mateo County Harbor District (District) has made signi昀椀cant
progress towards breaking ground on
the Surfers Beach Pilot Restoration
Project, a project that began in the
planning states in 2017. The Restoration Project will address two major
issues – shoaling inside Pillar Point
Harbor (PPH) and coastal erosion
caused by the Federal breakwater at
Surfers Beach, located directly adjacent to, but outside of, the harbor and
fronting Highway 1.
The project will result in improvements to navigation within the outer
harbor and operations at the boat
launch ramps, as well as mitigation of
damages from coastal storms and reduced recreational impacts at Surfers
Beach. The project involves dredging
up to 100,000-cubic yards of clean
sand along the harbor’s east breakwater and near the boat launch ramps
and using that sand to restore a previously existing beach by constructing
an elevated berm along an approx-
imately 1,000-foot-long section of
shoreline at Surfers Beach.
The overall goal for the proposed
Project is to mitigate the severe erosion that occurs on the beach adjacent
to the harbor due to the existence of
the east outer breakwater, a Federal
structure, built and maintained by
the Army Corps of Engineers. The
breakwater was built in the early
1960s and traps sand in the Harbor
while preventing it from moving
south naturally. This interruption of
sand 昀氀ow, and the wave dynamics
caused by the breakwater has also
caused signi昀椀cant beach and blu昀昀
erosion over the past sixty plus years
at Surfers Beach, threatening the
Coastal Trial and Highway 1. The
trapped sediment inside the breakwater and the resulting shoaling has had
a negative e昀昀ect on navigation and
anchoring. It also a昀昀ects operations at
the boat launch ramps which typically
require maintenance dredging every
6-8 years.
The proposed project is a pilot e昀昀ort,
meaning that a major objective is to
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