A trio of storms since early September has put considerable strain on the historic Long Beach boardwalk, which collapsed further between 64th and 65th Place on Seaside Walk during a weekend of heavy surf.
The city’s public works team and its Parks, Recreation and Marine bureau were working to secure it, putting up sandbags and rebuilding the berm to stop water intrusion. Officials are also continuing to monitor coastal homes that were red- and yellow-tagged during the weekend onslaught.
Mud and sand inundated the Long Beach Peninsula as waves breached the boardwalk’s protective timber bulkhead.
Inspectors red-tagged nine buildings along Seaside Walk, the Long Beach Post reported, with one building yellow-tagged. Red indicates an address is unsafe to enter, while yellow restricts use.
That fact that the damage to the boardwalk is cumulative presents a particular challenge, Long Beach Fire Department spokesperson Melanie Miller said Sunday.
“The collapse began when [Hurricane] Marie came,” in early September, she said, “and it’s been building off of that. Then Hurricane Polo, now [Tropical Storm] Rachel. It’s been continuous damage since then.
“There have been preparations — we even deployed 3,000-pound sandbags,” Miller added, “but you can only do so much during low tide; there are limited windows of opportunity. And the dynamics are working against you.”
Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said that the city was taking the situation “very seriously” and that it underscored “an importance to be incredibly serious in our region and in our state around climate resilience and coastal resiliency.”
He said the crumbling boardwalk is a historic thread in the city’s fabric.
“This is one of the oldest boardwalks in California and lots of memories were made on that boardwalk,” he said in an interview Sunday. “If we want to retain these iconic spaces on our coastline, it’s going to take real investment to make sure that we have an iconic, quality waterfront, a coastline that is resilient and acknowledges the changing climate.”
That investment will be expensive, Richardson said.
“You have to build more climate-resilient infrastructure. Because 100 years ago it wasn’t necessarily anticipated that we’d have this cadence of pressure — three major storm systems in six weeks is unprecedented in this region.”
The city of Long Beach has designed a “seven-point plan,” formalized shortly after Hurricane Marie, that addresses repairing what’s been damaged, putting more sand back on the beach, creating additional layers of protection and pursuing longer-term solutions and funding, Laath Martin, a spokesperson for the city manager’s office, said.
“As we responded to [Marie], we also looked at future plans and ways to address [the storms] in the immediate, moderate and long term,” Martin said. “We’ve had two additional storms since then. Some of the work is underway, and some is coming within days, weeks and months, depending.”
As of now, the city of Long Beach is in emergency response mode. It’s reinforcing the boardwalk with lumber and using the aforementioned 3,000-pound sandbags to “deflect wave energy on the beach side of the bulkhead, the seawall,” Martin said. “It takes a lot of the brunt of the damage.”
Martin said the city had accelerated certain projects to start as soon as the week of Oct. 19, particularly the Alamitos Bay Entrance Channel Dredging Project, which will relocate sand from the Peninsula and widen the beach by about 200 feet.
“We have to do a few things before then to ready it,” Martin said, “so our crews can safely work in those conditions.”
Longer term, the city has secured a contractor to carry out permanent repairs. The cost is estimated at $ 1.5 million to $ 3.6 million, Martin said. The money will come from the city’s Tidelands Emergency Reserves for coastal projects.
“Because we’re using a lot of materials right now to make emergency repairs to keep people safe, we then have to purchase more materials to do the permanent repairs,” Martin said. “That’s why there’s such a wide range.”
Martin said the city expected to complete permanent repairs to the bulkhead and boardwalk by the end of this year.
“With El Niño, we expect more storms. They built the timeline around anticipated storms to the best in our ability,” he said. “But this far in advance, you never know.”
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