OCEANSIDE, Calif. (KGTV) — Oceanside is one of San Diego County's most popular tourist destinations, drawing more than 5 million visitors to its beaches last year, according to the city.
But as more people come to enjoy the shoreline, a question keeps popping up: Where’s the sand?
Up in North County, the sun shines and people enjoy the ocean breeze, but the waves splash down on rocks instead of soft sand.
"What you see behind me here is our lack of a beach," Robert Ashton, CEO of Save Oceanside Sand, said.
Ashton has lived in Oceanside since 1961 and has watched the shoreline erode over the years.
"We've been losing our beach over decades and the city's really done nothing about it until recently," Ashton said.
Despite dredging the harbor annually, Oceanside has struggled to keep the beach in reach.
"It's just because of the construction of the coast we've urbanized our shoreline, so there's no sand coming from decomposition of these cliffs," Ashton said. "We've dammed the rivers and we've altered the coast with harbor structures.”
Now, the city is trying something different.
"We had a jury and the jury voted, in the end for this artificial reef, design, which is called the living speed bumps design," said Jayme Timberlake, Oceanside’s Coastal Zone Administrator.
The artificial reef would be built offshore between Tyson Street and Wisconsin Avenue, sitting 900 feet from shore and shaped like a butterfly. A 1/35 scale model of the structure was tested through thousands of wave cycles to validate the design.
The reef, combined with two headlands on the beach, would create a wave pool-like effect intended to keep sand on the shore. The design is being finalized by a team at Oregon State University, with a report expected in June. If funding and permits fall into place, the project could be shovel-ready by the fall of 2027.
"The community wants their beach back and not only temporarily through just dredging and placing sand on the shore, which goes away, they want it back for the long haul for generations to come," Ashton said.
