For many of us, beaches aren’t just a place we go for fun or vacation. The more time we spend at any particular spot, or along the coast in general, the more they become a part of our identity. They’re not expendable or replaceable. They’re an integral part of our existence.
The thought of losing one, let alone several, is beyond words.
Yet that is exactly what is happening to an extreme degree in Southern California and around the country. While plausible solutions exist, the powers that be show little concern for serious solutions. It is widely known that you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. Yet, here we are, dredging sand, dumping boulders, and hoping seawalls will keep everything from falling into the sea.
It begs the question, if data centers can be approved and built in what feels like the blink of the eye, why can’t we restore dunes, build jetties, and deploy other logical approaches to saving our beaches? A typical data center costs roughly $1 billion and takes about two years to build and they’re popping up all over the US. Restoring beaches is far less expensive and controversial. People hate data centers. We clearly need to rethink our priorities.
This El Niño is on track to be the strongest recorded, and its destructive effects are all too obvious. Buildings have been red-tagged, communities are flooding, a nearly 400-foot crack has opened in the bluff under PCH in Orange County, waves are slamming the railroad, San Onofre’s facilities have been damaged and closed, and so many beaches are gone or barely there. With another round of king tides forecast for November 24 to 26 and December 23 to 25, right in the window for powerful winter swells, there’s likely a lot more (expensive) damage on the way.
After storms like these, the response is almost always the same: rock, sandbags, and concrete go onto the beach under emergency permits. The effects of these reactions are detailed in Surfrider’s 2026 State of the Beach Report which graded 30 coastal and Great Lakes states on their policies for preventing unnecessary permanent armoring. No state earned an A, 27 of the 30 earned a C or lower, and 40% earned a D or F. The report describes an “Emergency to Permanent Permit Pipeline”: an emergency is declared, armoring goes in with weak limits, enforcement lags, and the “temporary” structure stays, pinning the beach in place and accelerating erosion on neighboring properties.
San Clemente may be the clearest example. According to Surfrider, a series of emergency permits since 2021 has placed roughly 27,000 tons of riprap along the rail corridor, turning the beach that used to connect the Trestles zone to the rest of town into an impassable pile of boulders.
At a recent Coastal Commission meeting in Oceanside, residents demanded answers over the continued emergency permitting, according to Courthouse News. Save Our Beaches San Clemente Chairman Gary Walsh said the community was told four years ago that officials were studying how to get sand down. “Now, in that length of time, SpaceX has managed to build a rocket and send astronauts around the moon,” he told commissioners. Surfrider’s Mitch Silverstein said the group is “dismayed and alarmed to see over 30 emergency permits for armoring across Orange County,” adding up to around 30,000 tons of boulders on public beaches.
Commissioner Raymond Jackson of Hermosa Beach appeared to agree. “At what point does the word emergency become an indefinite permitting mechanism for something that’s foreseeable, and has been studied for years?” he asked.
The latest permit allows the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) and its partners to add up to 15,000 tons of new riprap and ballast along nearly a mile of track just south of San Clemente State Beach through next July. An OCTA spokesman said the agency understands the frustration and is working to expedite plans to place up to 690,000 cubic yards of sand along San Clemente’s beaches. In the meantime, he said, “in locations where waves are directly threatening the railroad and little or no beach remains, immediate stabilization is necessary.” The line is the only passenger rail between Los Angeles and San Diego.
“So many people are sick of all the rock dumping here in San Clemente,” says SURFER Editor in Chief Jake Howard, a longtime San Clemente resident. “It feels like it’s gotten really out of control, like they’re just panicking and have no idea what to do. And other beach communities appear to be following suit.”
Silverstein, who has been attending Coastal Commission meetings, says armoring the beach to protect the railroad destroys the beach without protecting the railroad. “Everybody loses.” The commission is expected to take up sand placement and vote next month, with a hearing Silverstein says is set for Thursday, November 5. It’s in San Francisco, but anyone can testify by Zoom.
It doesn’t have to be this way. At Surfers’ Point in Ventura, a managed retreat-restoration project that has been decades in the making was completed this March. Rather than armor the beach in place, the final phase moved the remaining bike path and parking lot inland onto Fairgrounds property and rebuilt the shoreline with a cobble berm and sand dunes, giving the beach room to move with the waves. The California Coastal Conservancy approved $16.2 million for the work, and it stands as a model for the long-term planning Surfrider says an emergency permit should lead to.
Surfrider recommends that every coastal state redefine emergencies to exclude forecasted hazards, require written authorization first, limit emergency structures to two years, and follow up with long-term fixes like dune restoration and planned relocation. “An emergency permit should buy time for meaningful adaptation, not become a poor substitute for it,” says Emma Haydocy of Surfrider.
El Niño isn’t a surprise. Neither is sea level rise and coastal flooding. The question is whether we respond with a plan or keep our heads in the (disappearing) sand.
Related: More Gigantic Kelvin Waves Are Coming to California During Super El Niño
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