California coastal town desperate to save its city's beaches

May 16-In a small suburb north of San Diego, the beaches are a warning. At low tide, the squishy, soaked sand leaves nowhere to lay out a towel. When the tide is high, the water reaches all the way to the stairs up to the street above, leaving no sand at all. The waves are sparse because the beach is dissolving into the sea.

Coastal erosion is a statewide problem, but in Oceanside, it's much more visible - and occurring more rapidly.

"The only reason we have sand is because we dredge the harbor every year and place the sand," Oceanside's coastal zone administrator, Jayme Timberlake, told SFGATE earlier this week. "Every single year we place sand, and it still goes away."

With $2.8 billion annually wrapped up in the city's tourism economy from beachgoers and sun seekers, the city is now banking on an artificial reef to save its coastline.

A problem decades in the making

A 2023 study by the U.S. Department of the Interior found that California could lose as much as 75% of its beaches by 2100 due to projected sea-level rise related to climate change. Oceanside may provide one of the clearest views of what could happen to California's coastline when beaches run out of sand.

Oceanside's beaches were already at a disadvantage. The city of Oceanside conducted a feasibility study in 2021 that found that because the beach has such fine-grained sand, big waves carry it out to sea and don't bring it back.

The beach has a much shorter coastal bluff than other beaches in San Diego County, explained Mitch Silverstein, the California policy senior coordinator at the Surfrider Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting the world's beaches and oceans. A 2025 study by UC San Diego found that erosion from the bluff contributes nearly half of the beach's sand. But the city also allowed development too far onto the beach, cutting into this crucial sand supply.

"They kind of shot themselves in the foot," Silverstein told SFGATE. "It's not anyone's fault because it happened before our time, but that's a big factor."

In 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Pendleton's harbor, which also contributed to beach erosion. The harbor's sea wall causes sand to build up on the north side and blocks it from washing back down south to replenish the beaches. Gary Griggs, a professor of earth and marine sciences at UC Santa Cruz, told SFGATE this is one of the biggest contributors to the city's coastal erosion woes.

The army has recognized its role in the beach's coastal erosion since 1953. In 2000, the Water Resource Development Act, a federal piece of legislation, ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a study on how to mitigate the erosion and complete it in under three years, later amended to under four years. That study is yet to be completed.

"The federal government said, 'Oceanside, we understand we're the cause of erosion on your shoreline,'" Timberlake explained. "The corps has still not completed their study 23 years later. This is just a study that says here's what the federal government is gonna offer to us to fix the problem that we have. That's why we're doing city-led projects."

The breaking point

For years, governmental bodies have attempted traditional fixes to solve the problem. In 2012, the San Diego Association of Governments launched the Regional Beach Sand Project, returning sand to some of the county's most affected shores. But while other beaches in the region have seen sand retention, Oceanside has not.

"In other places, it stuck around. Like in Carlsbad, you can still see that same sand. In Oceanside, no - in like two years it was gone," Timberlake said.

The city continues its annual harbor dredging, but it now also attempts to incorporate sand from more unconventional sources, such as leftover sand from basement construction projects.

"This is where we are," Timberlake said. "This is what we're having to do in order to keep any sand on the beach."

The city proposed a groin structure in 2019 - a rock structure built perpendicular to the shore that aggressively traps sand. The Surfrider Foundation opposed the solution due to concerns of losing sand at other beaches in the area. When the plan was approved by the city council in 2021, three cities to the south passed resolutions opposing the measures, the Foundation reported.

"We wanna support saving beaches for the whole county and for every beach, not just one place over the other, and when you build a manmade sand retention device like that, you will certainly retain sand in one place, but you will disrupt and cut off that sand to neighboring beaches," said Silverstein, the Surfrider policy coordinator. "... Since it doesn't help every beach, there's a winner and a loser."

For decades, Oceanside has pulled plenty of tricks from the coastal playbook: Dump sand, armor the shore, wait for federal help. None of it stopped the beach from disappearing. After years of growing concern, the group Save Oceanside Sand, aka SOS Oceanside, formed in 2019 to save the city's beaches.

"Oceanside is a hub for surfing, you've got one of the greatest concentrations of surf industry in the country here, and it is also a hub for fishing, and recreation, and the beach is important to Oceanside," Charlie Bowen, spokesperson for Save Oceanside Sand, told SFGATE. "I think the community starts to feel the pain when two-thirds of its beaches are unusable."

An experimental approach

Now, Oceanside is trying something different. In June 2023, Timberlake spearheaded an international competition for engineering firms to come up with a project to save the sand. Among the proposals was an idea for "Living Speed Bumps" from an Australia-based firm, International Coastal Management. Its design envisioned two artificial headlands that would slow down the sand's movement back to the ocean, and a butterfly-shaped artificial reef that would reduce the wave energy that pulls the sand into the ocean. In January 2024, a jury and advisory panel of "local, state and national experts" selected International Coastal Management's proposal as the one to pursue.

"[The reef] still allows wave energy to hit our other surf breaks on the north and the south end," Bob Ashton, CEO of Save Oceanside Sand, told SFGATE. "So it's a system that works together not only to keep the sand in place and protect the beach from being washed away, but still allows the wave energy to see our good surf breaks at the pier and other surf breaks to the south."

The $55 million project, dubbed Re: Beach by the city, also includes dumping 900,000 cubic yards of sand on the beach taken from offshore - about four times more than what is dredged from the harbor each year.

"The idea is you don't have to keep ... bringing in sand and watching it move off the shoreline," Timberlake said. "It's a bigger bang for your buck - a better investment."

Reinhard Flick, a coastal oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the project will likely work, but it's still experimental.

"It will work in the sense that it will widen the beach behind the offshore structure," Flick told SFGATE. "How much, how far it will reach and how long it will last - I don't think that's known."

More than 1,000 simulations of waves were tested on a 1:35 scale model in a wave pool at Oregon State University between January and March, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. But Griggs, the UC Santa Cruz professor, cautioned that there are still several unknowns.

"One of the problems with scaling things down, you can't scale sand ... you can't make sand smaller, so that's a bit of a problem when you're trying to model what sand's gonna do," Griggs said.

With Oceanside experiencing some of the most severe effects of coastal erosion and the city taking a new approach, it serves as a guinea pig. The artificial reef project could open the floodgates for more manufactured structures along the California coast.

"Just north of Oceanside, San Clemente, they're starting to propose artificial reefs, so they've kind of got their eye on, is the Coastal Commission gonna approve this in Oceanside? If it does get approved, will they find funding, and will it work? And if it does, well, let's get our project going," Silverstein said.

Silverstein represented Surfrider's interests on the advisory board, but he was not a voting member, as Surfrider maintains that any human-made structures pose a risk to the safety of all California beaches.

"I think we also have concerns about opening the can of worms on this type of project for California. And is that really gonna help things, or is that just gonna exacerbate the problematic aspects of using man-made sand retention structures?" he said.

However, according to the Re:Beach website, the city says the design team was required to make sure impacts on other beaches in the area are "fully mitigated," and that "Designs must propose solutions that result in an equivalent or greater amount of sand flowing to its neighbors to the south."

Looking ahead

The artificial reef project is about 65% through the design and testing phase, according to Timberlake. After that's complete, the city will need permit approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, California Coastal Commission and the Regional Water Quality Control Board to start building, which could take up to a year and a half to secure. Then there's the process of Oceanside securing the $55 million it needs to fund it.

Bowen said Save Oceanside Sand is reaching out to politicians and the California Coastal Commission for financial support. The city has a grant application in with the California State Parks Division of Boating and Waterways and another with the California State Coastal Conservancy.

"I think the Coastal Commission realizes that we've reached a point where we have to do something and that the cost of doing nothing is increasing," Bowen said.

Timberlake, Oceanside's coastal zone administrator, said funding could also come from the city's general fund and Measure X, a temporary increase to the sales tax approved by voters and intended to fund infrastructure repairs and general city services. If all goes to plan, construction could start in 2028, and it could possibly be completed in only a year.

"It'll depend a lot on how Mother Nature works," Timberlake said. "If we have this nonstop swell, and if we have an El Nino year - if there is any kind of disruption with waves, it'll take a while just for the reef to get done, but little by little it'll get done."

But even proponents of the project understand it's not a permanent solution.

"Who knows how long we'll be willing to make the investment?" Timberlake said. "In 50 years we'll have had some time with the project to then plan for bigger sea level rise impacts, but the idea is to keep the place safe for now and for the next 20 to 30 years, and take that time to plan."

For decades, Oceanside waited: for sand to stick, for storms to ease, for federal help that never came. The artificial reef hasn't been built yet. But the future it's meant to address - one with shrinking beaches, harder choices and cities forced to adapt sooner than expected - has already arrived.

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This story was originally published May 16, 2026 at 10:36 AM.