The Orange County Transportation Authority was given the green light to immediately start work to secure a portion of the rail line through San Clemente, though only part of the proposed project earned emergency status.
The California Coastal Commission recently granted a go-ahead for emergency work on a northern section of the coastal tracks in San Clemente. But work toward the south that would involve adding boulders and sand and building a new 1,400-foot-long reinforcement wall on the inland side of the Mariposa Bridge still needs further analysis before moving forward, commissioners decided.
That also delays the rebuilding of the city’s popular coastal beach path destroyed by a landslide.
With the commissioner’s approval for the emergency work, the OCTA’s board of directors this week authorized CEO Darrell E. Johnson to move ahead with the work.
“Our priority remains clear: to move quickly, make the most of the state and federal funding we’ve already secured, and deliver as much of the needed work as possible, as soon as possible,” Johnson said in a statement. “We appreciate the Coastal Commission affirming what we have long recognized — that an emergency exists along this corridor.“
Following weeks of passenger service shuttered by another landslide in January 2024, OCTA officials identified four “hot spot areas” as most vulnerable to catastrophic failure from beach erosion, wave impacts, and slope failure.
Since 2021, emergency response to landslides and damage to this section of the 351-mile Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo, or LOSSAN, Corridor has cost taxpayers more than $40 million to restore service. The response to track damage has been both in the form of placing boulders to build up revetments and the construction of containment walls.
“This action enables OCTA to act quickly and decisively to protect our coastal rail line,” OCTA Chair Doug Chaffee, also Orange County’s Fourth District supervisor, said in a…
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