And you guys thought I was kidding

Or just giving someone a hard time. Not joking. If they'd been organized enough or well off enough to build a harbor, this wouldn't have happened. Never invest in a place where your town slides into the ocean. Looks to me like a lot more than two homes have been tagged. Maybe those are the ones that have yet to slide down the hill.

An Orange County coastal town grapples with losing its beach (msn.com)

Railroad passenger service through San Clemente has been halted twice because the seaside track shifted from waves pounding the soil, leaving commuters scrambling.

The lifeguard headquarters near the town’s pier may have to be moved back from the beach — away from the encroaching sea — and into a parking lot.

In south San Clemente, two homes have been red-tagged and the Cyprus Shore community is mourning the loss of its beach, now a rocky wasteland. On the north end of town, beachgoers have to time their visits based on tides to find sand.

The shoreline from San Clemente to Dana Point is a microcosm of what issues can arise when the beach disappears from a “beach town” – and how much is at stake for coastal communities when their sand disappears.

“It’s unreal to see how fast it’s changing. It just underscores the need to act now,” said San Clemente Mayor Chris Duncan, who calls the town’s erosion woes his No. 1 issue. “This isn’t going to fix itself, we need to lean into it and start taking some meaningful action. This has got to be front and center for us — without our beach, we are not San Clemente.”

Immediate action to preserve the sand on shores and replenish supplies needs to be taken, Duncan said, and the damage caused by crashing waves now hitting straight onto the rail line without a sandy beach to act as a buffer is “absolutely a wake-up call.”

Train trouble

The train tracks through San Clemente are a key piece of infrastructure as part of the Los Angeles-San Diego (LOSSAN) Corridor, the second busiest route of its type in the nation. It annually transports more than 8.3 million passengers and moves more than $1 billion in goods — its proximity to ports and Camp Pendleton labels it a national defense asset.

A 700-foot section, which less than a decade ago was buffered by a stretch of sand, is now being hit by rising waves threatening to swallow the rails. On the other side of the tracks, an eroding bluff is pushing the rail seaward, making passenger travel too dangerous to continue without repairs.

The line between San Clemente and Oceanside has been closed to passenger trains since late September for emergency fixes and might not reopen until February. It is the second emergency closure in a year. Freight trains continue to run, but on a smaller scale.

The Orange County Transportation Authority, which owns the right-of-way, is spending $6 million, with another $6 million from the California Transportation Commission, to get passenger trains chugging again on the coastal rail.

While the economic effect of the closure has not been computed, ridership on Metrolink’s service on its Orange County and Inland Empire – Orange County lines was down by 3,000 boardings for the month of October, a drop of about 3%. Ridership on Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner service was down for October by an estimated 60,000 potential passengers.

The closures and loss of ridership beg the question: Why didn’t the OCTA, which has owned the track right-of-way since 1993, do something earlier to prevent the emergency? Amid decades of warnings from engineers and environmentalists about the changing coast, why did the agency not take action until an emergency occurred requiring quick fixes?

The answer from OCTA Chief Executive Officer Darrell Johnson is that the changes occurred faster than anyone expected.

“There’s no secret that a rail line next to an ocean is going to be vulnerable … there’s always vulnerability,” Johnson said. But at what point, he asks, does that vulnerability become a high risk?

JAVA: DUH. What have I been saying here? Having tracks behind expensive houses running at the base of sliding bluffs and into the ocean is STOOOOOOOPID.

In January 2021, an OCTA report on the potential effects of climate change on the agency’s 25-mile corridor warned the line could someday be compromised by the ocean and the elements.

Just a few months earlier, the city of San Clemente had notified OCTA the private bluff on the land side of the tracks was moving, potentially pushing the rails toward the ever-rising sea, Johnson said.

“In the last 24 months there has been significant sliding of the slope and erosion of the beach that no one looking at this issue before had forecast,” he said, adding there was nothing the agency could have done sooner.

“We do not own the sliding slope, we do not own the eroding beach. We’re caught in the middle,” he said. “We’re caught between private property and Mother Nature.”

Added OCTA spokesman Eric Carpenter: “The 700-foot stretch of rail is something that happened a lot quicker than we expected. We didn’t know about this particular stretch and any movement there until it did become an emergency.”

During the first closure of the rail line in September 2021, OCTA obtained emergency state and federal permits to dump boulders on the seaward side of the rails to act as a wall against the threatening waves. It’s an often-used, yet controversial emergency measure. More boulders were dumped this fall after it was discovered the ground beneath the tracks had moved 28 inches toward the sea over the last year.

In all, 18,000 tons of rock or “rip rap” have been dropped on that section of coast, a quick solution that environmentalists say could end up backfiring by keeping the beach from rebuilding itself with sand.

On the land side of the tracks, the agency has obtained state permission to place a retaining wall and anchors to hold back the privately owned slope.

Johnson said OCTA will work with the state Coastal Commission and other agencies to find a long-term solution for the endangered rails, potentially including creating “living shorelines” with vegetation, cobble and sand, or relocating the rails inland — which would cost billions of dollars.