Environment

Beach Face Lift To Begin Next Month

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published August 27, 2012 at 8:31 AM PDT

This story was published more than 12 years ago.

San Diego beaches will get a face-lift next month as millions of tons of sand are pumped from the ocean floor onto beaches from the South Bay to North County.

San Diego beaches will get a face-lift next month as millions of tons of sand are pumped from the ocean floor onto beaches from the South Bay to North County.

It’s a $28 million project and it’ll spread more than a million cubic yards of sand on eight San Diego beaches. Project manager Shelby Tucker says it’s worth millions to San Diego’s tourist economy, but it’s not just for the benefit of beach-goers. It’s part of San Diego’s ecosystem.

“It does provide a nice place for people to recreate,” she said. "But also an environmental benefit for grunion, and for nesting and foraging shorebirds plus other species that use the beaches, and then obviously there’s a shore protection benefit as well.”

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The last time the San Diego Association of Governments did a sand replenishment project was in 2001. Tucker says though the sand did eventually wash away, it lasted for up to five years.

85 percent of the money comes from a state grant from the Department of Boating and Waterways. Several San Diego coastal cities have contributed the other 15 percent in matching funds.

The dredging boat that will undertake the job is on its way to San Diego and should arrive next weekend. The company has to train crew members who live in San Diego and then officials hope they will be ready to begin work in Imperial Beach the first week of September. They hope the work will be finished in November before winter storms kick in.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.