Efforts to add sand to the beach in San Clemente have been paused, with the contractor leaving the site following “ongoing sand quality issues” with the $14 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers replenishment project, according to city and federal officials.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to allow the contractor, Manson Construction, to delay the project up to 70 days to ensure that quality sand is dredged for finishing the project, according to a joint statement by U.S. Rep. Mike Levin, who represents south Orange County and northern San Diego County, and Mayor Victor Cabral.
Work is expected to restart in two months with better quality sand. The project’s completion is critical to San Clemente’s residents and economy, and for protecting local infrastructure, including a key rail corridor that runs along the coast in town and is vulnerable to the ocean’s waves without a sand buffer in place, officials said.
The Army Corps of Engineers informed officials on Jan. 13 that Manson Construction had decided to postpone the delivery of material to San Clemente. Now the dredger will return to San Clemente after it finishes a Solana Beach sand replenishment project, officials said.
Manson Construction is also contracted to do a larger $23 million sand replenishment project that will bring an expected 1.1 million cubic yards of sand to north Orange County beaches. That project kicked off in mid-December, just before San Clemente’s project got underway at the end of the month.
While the northern sand replenishment has been performed periodically since the 1960s, San Clemente’s project is being done for the first time using sand from a borrow site off of Oceanside. It is expected to be repeated every five years, for the next 50 years.
The San Clemente project, which has been more than two decades in the making, calls for 251,000 cubic yards of sand to be delivered to the shore between T Street and Linda Lane, including the north and south…
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