[music] -I moved here about seven years ago, and I immediately noticed that the beaches were in trouble, that they were starting to narrow.

As the beaches get narrower and narrower, what happens is the railroad becomes worried about the security of their tracks, and they start throwing out more and more of these really large boulders that you see here, the riprap.

I started talking to the city and city officials about this problem and how they needed to put more sand down and address this problem, or else we're going to end up with beaches that are just filled with boulders.

-The rock is meant to protect the integrity of the rail line.

The armory provides a level of predictability to anchor and protect the rail line.

The sand, while it is a very good source for buffering between the .. and the rail line, there's a lack of predictability in terms of the ability for the sand to stay resident for a long period of time such that there isn't direct ocean wave intrusion against the rail line.

-What is ocean wave intrusion?

-That would be, in simple terms, the wave pounding against the rail line.

Mother Nature is a very strong force, and we have seen, over the last handful of years, there's been situations where there's literally no beach, and what's separating the rail line is really just the protection of the rocks that's there and the Pacific Ocean.

That's why it's needed to protect the rail line.

OCTA, as the County Transportation Agency, owns 42 miles of the rail line in Orange County, of which 7 miles of the rail line is actually through a very critical southern Orange County portion, and it goes through the cities of San Clemente as well as Dana Point and San Juan Capistrano.

For the Amtrak service, it's actually the second busiest in the nation from the standpoint of passenger throughput.

It is really the only alternative via the coast, the Interstate 5, so it is a critical rail line that carries both passenger as well as freight for our neighbors to the south.

This particular rail line has been in operation for over 130 years, and for the first 120-plus years, we have seen closures that happened, I would say, pretty sporadically, but something happened along the way starting around fall of 2021 where we have seen a series of rail closures that's led to passenger rail service disruptions.

It's a function of both coastal erosion on the beach side and inland bluff failures on the inland side.

It's a very challenging situation for the rail line to be nestled between the Pacific Ocean to the west and then the inland bluffs to the east.

It's definitely a straightjacket for the rail line.

There's absolutely not a lot of room to maneuver.

-The amount of rock they have here we believe is an appropriate amount to structurally support their tracks.

What they want to do is put rock all the way out to there and across the entire San Clemente State Beach.

The boulders do at least temporarily protect the structure of the railroad tracks, but what they do is actually increase the erosion and make the beaches erode even faster.

We used to get some erosion from the bluffs, and that would feed some of the beaches, but the railroad is elevated and that blocks that sand.

Every year we lose a little bit of sand offshore or down coast, and if it's not replaced by natural sources, the beach just gets narrower and narrower.

-Tonight, I want to focus on what will shape our coastline in the near term and why it represents greatest immediate threat to .. We have a critical choice in San Clemente.

We can protect the rail line and our world-class beaches together, or we can allow our beaches to disappear behind a failing approach paid for with our tax dollars.

This is where you can help.

Support leaders that are advocating sand replenishment over hard.. -My organization is advocating for a sand-only or a sand-first approach.

We think that sand is the best way to protect the tracks, and it's also the best way to protect this wonderful public resource we have because the rocks themselves won't keep the water out.

The only thing that's going to keep the water out is the sandy beach.

You can truck in sand, we've done that on smaller projects, but the trucking involves a lot of other undesirable environmental consequences.

There's air quality.

There's traffic.

It's just more expensive, and so for a larger project, you really need to go offshore, and you dredge up.

What you're actually dredging up is ancient beach dep.. During the last ice ages, the coastline was miles offshore, and that's where the beaches were.

As the glaciers melted, it covered up those beaches, and so we're going back out and seeking those ancient beach deposits, and you dredge it up and place it back on the beach.

-What we're finding with respect to sand is while sand is a great mechanism and instrument as a buffer for the rail line, it takes a very large volume of sand to actually provide that sufficient buffer.

You're talking about potentially half a million or greater cubic yard of sand, and in terms of that quantity, it would take many, many years to actually be able to bring that amount of sand in from a sand source, and the permitting process is very complex when it comes to sand.

With the prediction that we're seeing with sea level rise and climate change over the next 50 years, any development, namely the tracks in South Orange County with r.. will be vulnerable to both sea level rise and climate change over the next several decades, so that is something that we're mindful of, and we're looking to basically come up with solutions to protect it.. while we're looking at longer term solutions.

-There's been talk of moving the rails inland.

They started talking about it three years ago.

They got money for a study.

They spent the money on other things, and now they have said that Caltrans is going to study the relocation.

The issue is there's no land.

The only land where they could do it would be the tunnel under the I-5 freeway.

That's going to take at least five years to study whether it can be done and another 20 or 30 years to construct it.

That's a whole generation, and I'm not willing for a generation to miss out on our beaches, and that rock, once it's on our beach, isn't going to go away, so it's a forever loss for all of our generations.

-Thanks for watching.

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