J. Stalmer

Del Mar Beach Club, 2018

The Solana Beach city council has approved emergency repairs to a large section of a failing seawall below the Del Mar Beach Club condominium complex.

Upper bluff – current

Sitting at the edge of a bluff above the ever shrinking beach are 63 "stacked units" at 825 S. Sierra Ave., said to be in danger of falling into the ocean. Several bluff collapses occurred in 2019 at Fletcher Cove, while a catastrophic slide took lives in Encinitas.

"Portions of that wall could kick out next week," said geotechnical consultant Bob Trettin, explaining that phase one of a planned three-stage repair is definitely an emergency.

Bluff after repairs – proposed

The tiebacks that serve to stabilize the 540-foot long, 15-foot high lower bluff seawall are “severely compromised,” according to a geotechnical review last spring by Soil Engineering and Construction, Inc.

Ongoing erosion and bluff failures are behind the weakening of the protective devices.

Details of repairs

Two locations in need of immediate repair are the southern 170 feet of the lower bluff seawall, and an upper bluff drilled pier wall at the southern property line. Repairs to the lower wall include new tieback anchors for lateral support; replacing concrete; installing weep holes; and fixing the underside of the lower landing of a staircase. Now the project has been approved by the city, it will go to the California Coastal Commission for final review.

After these, the Del Mar Beach Club Homeowners Association, the applicant, will be back for more repairs along the entire wall, which Trettin said "may be an emergency."

Lower seawall

Seawalls are increasingly controversial as sea rise and rain hammer away at the coastline. Seawalls prevent sand from reaching the beach, causing it to shrink continuously. Opponents of private armoring say the beach also belongs to the public. 

The condos were built prior to the 1976 Coastal Act. The lower bluff seawall was approved by the Coastal Commission in 1980, when few conditions applied other than maintenance — which was right around the corner. Only four years later, sand loss had undermined the wall, calling for deeper foundation footings and backfill.

Existing stairs

Next, the mid-bluff was in need. In 1989, a 40-foot long, 15-foot high mid-bluff retaining wall was built "to underpin the southwest corner condominium structure." In 2001, at the same site, the city and coastal commission approved the installation of five drilled piers ranging from 28 -70 feet deep.

Kristin Brenner, with Surfrider Foundation, described it as an endless series of fixes to a seawall built in 1984, its permit likely to be extended another 20 years. 

"We're talking about a permit that will have been in existence for 65 years by the time we reach the end of it. We're calling this 'repair and maintenance,'" she said.

"So when does this stop being maintenance and become replacement in kind?"

One of the coastal plans for the city talks about phasing out private staircases in favor of public, Brenner said. "And there is a public easement that runs right from the border all the way to the beach along the south side of that condo complex."

She suggested as a condition of the permit it become a "joint public-private staircase, where if you could just extend from that beach access to a shared landing point, they could still have their private gated beach access and we could also gain a public beach access for the city."

City officials said the staircase repairs are to less than 50 percent of the structure, so it won't have to be rebuilt.

A public stairway 300 feet away from the project is actually in another city, Trettin acknowledged. "The access way down the side of that easement is in the city of Del Mar, so it would make it kind of difficult."

He pointed to the mitigation fees the applicant will pay — $205,700 for public recreation and $47,458 for sand mitigation — which he said could go for whatever public access or other projects the city wanted.