Sand Replenishment Comes to IB Next Month

More than 400,000 cubic yards of sand will come to Imperial Beach at the end of August as part of SANDAG's Regional Beach Sand Project.

IB is the first of eight area beaches that will receive sand in the coming months.

Due to delays with dredge equipment, new sand will not hit IB shores until Sept. 2, said SANDAG Project Manager Shelby Tucker in an email to IB Patch.

A hard surface pipe that carries the sand will begin to appear on the beach weeks prior to when pumping begins. Pipes and earth moving equipment will move sand around the beach.

A ship named Liberty Island is traveling to San Diego through the Panama Canal from New Jersey to pump sand from waters near Mission Beach onto the Imperial Beach shoreline. 

Replenishment will start near the south end of Seacoast Drive and end south of the pier, and will take place 24 hours a day.

The beach will remain open like any any other day and no more than 500 feet of beach will be closed down at a time, Tucker told the Imperial Beach City Council at their June 6 meeting earlier this year.

"The ship goes out to the borrow site, sucks the sand up into the hull of the ship and steams over to the receiver site," Tucker said.

The project was originally scheduled to begin in April 2012. Although work will start late, with a larger dredge, work may be completed in half the time it took during the first replenishment project in 2001.

"With the quality of sand that you're getting, it probably would have taken a month and a half or a month and three weeks to put all that sand on your beaches, but it's going to take a month," she said.

The primary source of funding for the project is $4.2 million from the California Department of Boating and Waterways.

The Imperial Beach Redevelopment Agency contributed $200,000 to the project.

Some funding obtained from the federal government that was slated for an Army Corps of Engineers project also helped fund IB's sand replenlishment project.

Monitors will watch sand coming out of the pipe to see if any metal, cultural resources or anything that isn't sand comes ashore. Shoreline monitoring program will take place after sand is piped to shore.

Last year about was brought to IB from the southern end of Point Loma below a Naval Submarine Base.

A 2001 SANDAG sand replenishment project put 2.1 million cubic yards of sand on San Diego's beaches.

To address any questions about the project, call the SANDAG Regional Sand Replenishment Project Hotline at 619-699-0640.

A copy of a letter sent to local residents near the replenishment site along with other information attached to this story in PDF.