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Sand Replenishment Work Coming To Golden Gate National Recreation Area

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Published Date

September 10, 2014

Moving sand around -- from beaches that are growing too wide to those that are shrinking -- will be going on at Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California next month.

The work, being done by the National Park Service and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, "will be a repeat of the successful sand management actions done in 2012 where excess sand in front of the O'Shaughnessy Seawall (north Ocean Beach) is transported to the erosion hotspot south of Sloat Boulevard (south Ocean Beach)."

NRA officials say the dramatic shoreline changes along Ocean Beach are a result of both natural- and human-caused factors.

"In general, the beach at the northern end of Ocean Beach has been widening and accumulating sand while the area south of Sloat Boulevard has experienced a loss of beach and is eroding," a park release said. "The accumulation of sand impedes visitor beach access by filling in the seawall’s stairwells and promenade, and increasing sand maintenance effort of both the NPS and city. The placement of this excess sand at the erosion hotspot south of Sloat Boulevard helps protect the critical wastewater Lake Merced Transport Tunnel structure. The use of excess sand from the north end of Ocean Beach has been an important action to protect the tunnel and avoid the placement of hard engineered structures such as rock revetments."

Next month's work has four components:

* Sand Backpass - Approximately 30,000 cubic yards of sand will be excavated from north Ocean Beach within stairwells 1 to 28 and placed at two locations within the erosion hotspot south of Sloat Boulevard

* Wind-Erosion Control Measures - After the sand has been placed, one or more techniques will be used to reduce wind erosion, which may include living or non-living plant material, sand fencing, and / or pebbles and shell fragments to prevent sand from blowing onto the adjacent road and parking lots.

* Bank Swallow Nesting Impact Avoidance - Exclusion fencing and signage indicating sensitive habitat will be installed to discourage people from disturbing sensitive bank swallow habitat.

* Access Improvement - To guide the public to a safe beach access route across the sand berm at Reach 2 and to help minimize erosion of the berm or the bluffs by foot traffic, cable & post fencing and beach access signs will be installed.

A detailed project description and construction drawings can be viewed on the NPS planning website. The Park Service is interested in any issues or concerns the public may have regarding the proposed project. Comments are requested by September 26 so they can be considered before work begins.

The proposed project is part of an interim solution for the sand management and bluff protection issues at the north and south ends of Ocean Beach. NPS and SFPUC are also involved in the comprehensive planning efforts led by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) which is developing a long-term plan to fully address the complicated land-use, resource protection, public recreation and shoreline protection issues at Ocean Beach.

For more information on the Ocean Beach Master Plan, please visit this link.

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Comments

First, will you cite the source of that information you posted above, Beach?  For all we can tell, it may have come from some propaganda machine that has little regard for truthfulness.  At this point, we have no way of knowing.

Second, your continual insults of anyone who disagrees with you are very tiresome and inappropriate.  It begs the question as to just exactly who belongs in that "low IQ crowd" and doesn't do much to improve your credibility.  It requires much less intelligence to fling insults than it does to produce well reasoned arguments.


Lee, for what it's worth, there was a time when the seashore officially carried the "Recreation Area" tag. You can look it up in the administrative history. It's been some time since I researched the matter.

Regardless, those two words don't change the Park Service's managerial obligations.

And also, for what it's worth, the enabling legislation also specified that areas of the seashore be preserved as primitive wilderness, and that never quite happened.


I think attempting to create and preserve wilderness characteristics at Cape Hatterass and Cape Lookout is starting to occur.  When they started creating pedestrian only zones in these areas, and keeping people away from nests during the nesting to fledgling period that to me signals that progress is being made.  But you can see from some of the screaming minority that they don't want that part of the legislation enacted.  They want it to be a National Recreation Area, which in my opinion is the lowest type of NPS managed system on the NPS totem. And then you have people like Beach hoping to see the Department of Interior eliminated entirely (a tea party agenda), and you can see what they ultimately want - privitization where the beaches are subdivided and developed.  How is that any better?  It's not, unless you are one of the owners of the beach property, and seriously there are very few spots on the East Coast where you can find large stretches of uninterupted coast line.  Maybe beachdumb, just needs to tuck his tail and  move to one of those privatized areas.  Heck there's thousands of miles of coast already like that, instead of complaining about the last 50 or so miles at CHS where it is protected from such development.  Finally, Beachdumb's rhetoric is equivalent to calling Grand Teton or the Grand Cayon a National Monument, instead of a National Park.  Good luck with that. 


Thank you Kurt.


August, 1937: "Act of Congress authorizes establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The envisioned park is to stretch from the Virginia state line to Hatteras Inlet, some 62,000 acres. Its purpose is to preserve the area’s “primitive wilderness” and to provide recreational access to the general public"

June, 1940: "Congress amends Cape Hatteras National Seashore authorizing legislation to permit hunting later defined in relationship to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 to mean “waterfowl" hunting. “Recreational Area” also added to title to help emphasize the “recreational" orientation of the proposed seashore."

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/caha/caha_ah.pdf

Very interesting reading... Note in the timeline that there have been OHV issues since 1972... Oh, and sand has been trucked in for years for erosion control.


This is the point in a wandering 'discussion' where I usually go back to the top and realize: "Hmmm. Sand replenishment at Golden Gate. So why are people riding their own personal favorite hobby-horse?"

 

 


Rick--It's because it's the only horse they know how to ride.

Rick


Seems like there's little riding involved, just beating the horse continually, even after it's dead.  Now back to our regularly scheduled program...


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