Sand replenishment is expected to finish in Imperial Beach by Oct. 5, said Shelby Tucker with SANDAG. The final date for the 24-hour a day project is "a moving target," she said, and activity could stop as early as Tuesday.
The 2012 Regional Beach Sand Project started in IB Sept. 5 and will provide new sand to eight beaches on San Diego's coastline. Next stop is South Oceanside Beach.
Roughly 300,000 cubic yards of sand has been deposited on 2,600 feet of the Imperial Beach shoreline since replenishment started Sept. 7, Tucker said. Sand is being placed on the beach from the end of Seacoast Drive to the end of Elder Avenue.
An additional 150,000 cubic yards will be moved on to the beach before finishing next week.
A total of 1.4 million cubic yards of sand will be placed on the San Diego coastline during the project, or enough to nearly fill Qualcomm Stadium, SANDAG said.
Monitors working to ensure random objects or hazards aren't brought to the beach with the sand haven't found much, she said.
Other sand replenishment projects that got the sand from San Diego Bay have brought inanimate objects and metal to the shoreline.
"This project is dredging about a mile off the coast of Mission Beach. This is really optimal material. There's not much out there," Tucker said. "I think a whale bone came out, but there hasn't been rebar or huge pieces of metal or anything crazy like that."
A barge from New Jersey brought the sand here that is then pumped through pipes to the shore and spread out with earth moving construction equipment.
The project does not end immediately after sand is put on the beach as SANDAG's Shoreline Monitoring Program will keep track of beach width.
Over the next two years, Surfrider Foundation of San Diego will use a video camera installed in January to monitor the beach to see if new sand impacts surf and wave quality.
"One of the things they [SANDAG] weren't looking at was any impacts to surfing, and being Surfrider, that's something that's really important to us," said Surfrider study coordinator Julia Chunn-Heer.
