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By Curtis Brainard
New York Times
June 9, 2005
Santa
Barbara, Calif.
SOUTHERN California's second wettest winter on record has left
its mark. Last week a landslide in Laguna Beach severely
damaged 21 homes and sent hundreds of residents packing. In
January a deluge in La Conchita melted a hillside, destroying
homes and killing 10.
Heavy rains and hurricanes may grab the headlines, but a more
relentless force chews away at coastlines every day. Erosion
slowly destroys about 1,500 American homes and the land they
sit on annually, according to a report prepared for the
Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Wherever beachfront real estate lies, from California to
Delaware, communities are torn by competing forces: the
relentless loss of shoreline and the relentless desire of some
people to live on the scenic edge.
"A person doesn't move from a location like the one I
have unless you have to," said Mae Bergman, whose house
is perched on a 40-foot cliff in the Mesa area of Santa
Barbara. For one thing, she said, during her 48 years as an
owner the value of the house has zoomed from $26,000 to about
$2 million, a legacy she plans to pass down to her daughters.
For another, "I have the best coast spot in the whole
state," she said. "As long as I am living, the house
won't be for sale."
In Santa Barbara County, where waves can carve a foot a year
from seaside bluffs, some officials are less sanguine. Last
fall, about 10 miles from Mrs. Bergman's house, they evicted
about 90 tenants in five apartment buildings that used to be
inland but are now hanging about 35 feet above water at high
tide. The evictions, in the Isla Vista area, caught many by
surprise, but Santa Barbara's erosion problem is not news.
Since the mid-1970's, about 30 blufftop houses on the
south-central coast, which extends down to Ventura, have been
demolished or rebuilt, their seaside rooms lopped off to
stabilize their foundations.
The five apartment buildings, together worth about $20
million, were built in the 1960's, when erosion was a
recognized problem but the cliffs were still protected by a
wide beach. Photographs taken during the 1970's show swaths of
sand dotted with volleyball courts where waves now lap against
the bluffs at high tide.
The county also moved to evict tenants of four other buildings
on the same road, but after some owners contested the
decision, saying that danger was not imminent, the county
agreed to let the tenants stay. All nine buildings sit on
relatively fragile sedimentary shale, which tilts toward the
beach at a 45-degree angle, making it less stable. Erosion has
exposed pillars that were installed to stabilize the soil.
Their exposure, which invites waves to bounce among them and
the cliff, is quickening erosion, said the county geologist,
Brian Baca.
The owners of the evacuated buildings declined to comment
because they are appealing the evictions before the county
building and safety department. James Wilson, a lawyer
representing them, said that his clients were well aware of
the geologic environment, but were never given a deadline for
leaving the area; in his words, "there was no expectation
that it was going to end at some point."
Whatever the outcome of the appeal, Mr. Baca says, the problem
extends beyond nine buildings to the entire south-central
coast. "The whole system is moving landward, and there's
no stopping it," Mr. Baca said.
The report done for FEMA, by the H. John Heinz III Center for
Science, Economics and the Environment, a nonprofit research
group, said some 338,000 structures, strung along 9,500 miles,
were susceptible to erosion, with property damages amounting
to more than $500 million a year. Communities regularly lobby
Congress to sponsor sand-infusing "beach
nourishment" programs: for this year it allocated $112
million.
Sand naturally shifts around, changing the shoreline. But
before California was so heavily settled, its beaches could
rebuild with sediment swept down rivers. That natural process
no longer occurs in the same way. Meanwhile, the ocean keeps
eating away at the bottoms of cliffs, periodically claiming
large chunks of land.
Santa Barbara is one of several communities in a hilly,
10-mile-wide corridor between the ocean and the nearly
mile-high Santa Ynez Mountains, which stretch about 45 miles
along the coast. The topography creates an erosive vise, with
pounding waves on one side and water pouring down from the
mountains on the other.
During the 1980's and 1990's, county officials considered
various ways to control the impact of waves and weather. They
concluded that seawalls would be ineffective. But in 1982 they
tightened the building code, limiting construction to areas
expected to remain stable for at least 75 years.
Property owners and county officials are dealing with older
buildings case by case.
Most tenants at the five buildings evacuated last fall were
students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who
learned about the order weeks before school started. Nathan
Simarro, a sophomore, said that he and his five roommates were
caught in a frustrating, ill-timed back-and-forth.
"The landlord was saying one thing," he said.
"The county was saying another."
Winnie Wong, a senior, had lived in her apartment for a year
and described a similar state of confusion after receiving the
eviction notice in September and being told by her landlord,
she said, "not to worry" because "it was all
politics."
"The day that we signed the lease, we asked how safe is
the house because of its position, how well it would survive
an earthquake or erosion," Ms. Wong said. "You can
feel it when a wave hits the cliff and the house shakes a
little bit, but we never felt unsafe to the point that we'd
have to move."
Other property owners seem similarly ready to believe the
best. Ms. Bergman, 96, who lives on the aptly named Edgewater
Way, said that after El Nino-induced rain consumed 10 feet of
her backyard in 1997, she built $200,000 worth of terraced
parallel contoured walls of concrete, at strategic elevations.
She said she saw no reason to move the house or herself.
A neighbor, Gail Ward, 55, said that she and her husband,
Richard, 57, were also determined to stay put. She said they
bought their house in 1980 after a geological survey conducted
by a neighbor found little risk of rapid or excessive erosion.
An engineer checks drainage yearly.
"It's the risk homeowners take to live in areas along the
coast," Mrs. Ward said. "It's like homeowners that
live in areas prone to fire and clear away dry brush around
their property."
George Mearce, a real estate agent at Re/Max in Montecito,
Calif., said that despite erosion, housing values on the coast
are going up. "Here, you've got people with some
money," he said. "They want a view. They want
sunshine. So they say, O.K., I'm buying this home. It may have
a 75-year life expectancy, but if you are 50 years old, how
long are you going to stay in that house?
"And even if you're younger," he said, "erosion
is an imperfect science."
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