California begins ‘managed retreat’ from rising ocean
Higher ocean levels force Ventura officials to move facilities inland, an action that is expected to recur along the coast as the ocean rises over the next century. 
By Tony Barboza, Los Angeles Times
January 16, 2011 At Surfers Point in Ventura, California is beginning its retreat from the ocean. Construction crews are removing a crumbling bike path, ripping out a 120-space parking lot and laying down sand and cobblestones. By pushing the asphalt 65 feet inland, the project is expected to give the wave-ravaged point 50 more years of life. The effort by the city of Ventura is the most vivid example to date of what may lie ahead in California as coastal communities come to grips with rising sea levels and worsening coastal erosion. As the coastline creeps inland, scouring sand from beaches or eating away at coastal bluffs, landowners will increasingly be forced to decide whether to spend vast sums of money fortifying the shore or give up and step back. State officials say the $4.5-million project in Ventura is the first of its kind in California and could serve as a model for threatened sites along the coast. “Managed retreat, as it’s called, is one of the things that we’re going to have in our quiver to deal with sea-level rise and increasing storms,” said Sam Schuchat, executive officer of the California Coastal Conservancy, which helped fund the Surfers Point project. Sea levels have risen about 8 inches in the last century and are expected to swell at an increasing rate as climate change warms the ocean, experts say. In California, the sea is projected to rise as much as 55 inches by the end of the century and gobble up 41 square miles of coastal land, according to a 2009 state-commissioned report by the Pacific Institute. … At Surfers Point, Ventura officials first knew they had a problem about two decades ago, when storms started chewing away at the oceanfront bike path a few years after it was built. When heavy storms hit, waves ate mounds of sand, washed away chunks of asphalt and exposed rebar, car parts and junk that had been underground for decades. … “The challenge is we have built most of our civilization within a few feet of sea level or right at the edge,” said Gary Griggs, a coastal geologist at UC Santa Cruz who co-wrote the book “Living With the Changing California Coast.” “It’s either going to be managed or unmanaged, but it’s going to be retreat.” Some coastal residences are already faced with similar predicaments. In Santa Barbara, homes with exposed pillars teeter on the edge of the fast-eroding oceanside cliffs of Isla Vista. Residents on the bluffs of Pacifica in Northern California have had to evacuate their mobile homes and apartments as waves pounded dangerously close. Where residents have chosen to erect sea walls to protect their homes, including mansions built along Malibu’s Broad Beach and beachside mobile homes in San Clemente, the sands have narrowed so dramatically that walking along the seashore is impossible except at low tide. …
