Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
If you’re a surfer in Newport Beach like Assistant City Engineer Mike Sinacori, you doubtlessly noticed the pipes on 40th and 56th Streets which are pumping hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of dirt into our ocean. Everyone seems to be in the dark on this– including me until I asked– so hopefully this will clear up some of the murky waters surrounding these pipes.
As many dog owners and surfers know, the last few months have seen the dredging of Dog Beach to give a clear watershed for the Santa Ana River runoff. This ensures that the river doesn’t back-up somewhere and decide to switch course through a path of least-resistance… you know, like if it decided to re-route itself through a neighborhood.
The cost of the effort is tremendous, a $20m operation moving nearly half a million cubic yards of dirt and sludge out from the area, including lots of underwater and periphery vegetation which helped “hold in” some of the trash and pollutants that ran through the waterway. This means that our water is just a little bit dirtier than normal right now, but fret not– it’s not even enough to register on the water quality measurement sites like ocbeachinfo.com.
So what do these pipes have to do with the dredging? Well, the city regularly “shores up” different areas of the city as the ocean and bay do their best to steal all our sand (dang you, ocean and bay!). They import the sand mostly from other areas doing dredging projects, so there is a bit of ongoing exchange of sand throughout the beach communities. Yeah, weird, I know. Anyway, this time they are using the sand from Dog Beach. They are piping that massive multi-story sand mount out to the pipes on 40th street and– until a few weeks ago when it shut down– 56th street, too. This is done to attempt to get sand back into the “groins” of the jetties, so that the rocks don’t tumble down and require repair. During this process, it has significantly grown the beach and also created some significant breaks where there were none before.
The pipe on 56th Street will likely be removed soon, but the 40th one may or may not remain for ongoing dredging efforts on Dog Beach.
So wait, you say: Is this stuff harmful? It’s ugly, it’s gritty, and it murks the water. Nah. That’s just what happens when you dump a bunch of loose sand into a moving body of water. In fact, when the pipes are shut down, the water clears up within minutes. All you are seeing is the effect of massive sand-mixing. Remember Newport Beach like Assistant City Engineer Mike Sinacori? He actually surfed right at the dump-site for the sludge– with his kids– just to tell everyone how safe it was, because he knew this would be a question that people had.
But if you really just hate the looks of the water, just give it a few more weeks. The 40th Street pipe will be stopped shortly, also. But until then, enjoy surfing the new shapes. I hear there is a really awesome Left out there now. I’ll be checking it out shortly!
