Humboldt County officials have long debated what to do about Centerville Road, a narrow, twisting byway that leads to an eroding rural beach and a handful of homes.
The rising, warming sea and ferocious winter storms have battered the road. Often, it is completely covered by sand and saltwater.
Nearly two years ago, the Humboldt County Department of Public Works pitched a solution to the California Coastal Commission: Local officials wanted to elevate a 0.17-mile segment of Centerville Road by 10 feet and build a revetment, a sloping layer of rocks on the sand meant to protect it from the pounding surf, at least for a few years.
In September, the Coastal Commission gave the county permission to raise and repair the road a few miles west of the town of Ferndale, with conditions. Construction was expected to start early next year.
But this week, with a “super” El Niño on the horizon, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to surrender to the elements and abandon its long-sought $3.8-million project because the cliffs and bluffs over which Centerville Road runs are crumbling so fast that portions of the road could soon slide into the Pacific.
“That place is just mind-boggling, the unraveling of those slopes,” Supervisor Steve Madrone said at the Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, adding: “It’s all going to go. I mean, there’s no doubt that it’s just a question of time.”
Added Supervisor Mike Wilson: “That road will not last there forever.”
In directing the county’s public works staff to come up with a plan not to repair the road but to move it farther inland, the supervisors opted for a policy called “managed retreat,” which means pushing infrastructure back from the water’s edge.
It’s the kind of decision facing low-lying communitiesall along California’s 840-mile coastline, where historically hot ocean waters are pushing tide lines higher and where powerful waves — especially in this El Niño season — are battering beaches and infrastructurewith little mercy.
Managed retreat often is fraught with political challenges and local resistance. And in Humboldt County, the goal of moving Centerville Road inland has long faced pushback from adjacent private landowners, who have refused to grant right-of-way access because they worried about trespassing, vandalism and safety issues.
At the supervisors’ meeting, Lorraine Pedrotti, who owns property south of Centerville Beach, said the county has done a poor job communicating with nearby landowners. She said she was “concerned about the proposal to drop a shovel-ready project” for which the county had already secured federal and state disaster funding in favor of pursuing road realignment with no clear timeline or funding.
“I realize there’s a need to [have] a long-term solution, but in the meantime, dealing with a sometimes unpassable road for years is not acceptable,” she said.
George Brown, another landowner opposed to rerouting, said he lives half a mile from the bluffs and questioned whether the erosion was as precarious as officials said it was.
“I’ve watched those bluffs my entire life … I’ve climbed them. I’ve walked the beach underneath them,” he said. “They have definitely moved in the last 20 years. It’s been about 100 years since they moved before that. We don’t know that this is an ongoing, continuing situation. It could stop at any time.”
He added: “I’d like to see the entire beach erode all the way to our property before the road went across it.”
Centerville Beach, home to some of the state’s fastest-eroding cliffs, has been shrinking for decades. Many of its sandy dunes are gone. A beach parking lot that once accommodated up to 100 vehicles washed away, forcing visitors to park along the sandy shoulder of the road. And in 2024, a huge chunk of cliffside near the road collapsed, with onlookers sprinting from the edge as the ground crumbled.
When the Coastal Commission approved the coastal development permit for Centerville Road in September, it did so on the condition that the county plan to remove the elevated roadway and the rock revetment, as well as a newly constructed parking area, within 20 years with plans to move the road inland.
The Coastal Commission also required the county to stop allowing motorized vehicle access on the sand, infuriating locals who have long ridden onto the beach to go fishing and enjoy the rural seclusion.
Hank Seemann, the county’s deputy director of public works, told the supervisors that the worsening cliff erosion and high cost of raising and armoring the road — only to have to eventually move it inland anyway — made the project financially imprudent.
Only a tiny portion of Centerville Road, next to the sand, would be constructed. Just south of it, the road runs along dangerous ground.
About 1,500 feet of the road is less than 100 feet from the edge of the bluff, Seemann said, and at least two areas are less than 25 feet from the dropoff.
“Public works has significant concerns about the active landslide activity to the south,” he said, adding that “the benefits of doing the beach project could be lost if the road to the south is severely damaged or destroyed.”
In voting to abandon the road elevation project, the supervisors directed county staff to immediately begin developing plans to reroute the road and to approach — and potentially negotiate with — land owners.
Madrone said that “long-term, it’s to everybody’s advantage to have stable access, wherever that might be.”
He said that includes the land owners, who rely upon the road to access their property.
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