The pipe starts as a curling tail at a dredging barge outside Channel Islands Harbor. It floats for a few hundred yards across the water.
For a mile, it turns into a roller coaster, dipping below the harbor mouth, shooting below the sand of Silver Strand Beach and diving back down under the entrance to the Port of Hueneme.
It ends on Hueneme Beach where, day and night, a dark torrent of sediment and water erupts onto the sand. There, it rebuilds the eroded shoreline an inch at a time.
Dredging crews have until the end of the month to complete this year’s project, which harvests sand from the harbor to feed beaches down the coast.
Harbor Director Michael Tripp said the barge processes between 30,000 to 40,000 cubic yards of sand each day. Crews estimate they’ll get to a total 1.2 million: the equivalent of more than 13,600 full standard shipping containers.
The biennial project has been running since the 1960s, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Without it, the mouth of Channel Islands Harbor could clog and erosion on Hueneme Beach could begin to hurt infrastructure, as it did in 2014.
The final dredge total this year will be about half of the 2.5 million cubic yards of sand local officials hoped for. The project was shortened by nearly three months in the fall when the Army Corps hit permitting delays with the California State Water Resources Control Board. Dredging at Channel Islands Harbor is only allowed between October and February, when it won’t disturb shorebird nesting and migration.
Michael Tripp, Channel Islands Harbor director, looks at dredging pipes on Wednesday. Since January, dredging crews have been working to remove sand from the harbor mouth and pump it to Hueneme Beach to combat erosion.
The north end of the beach perpetually recedes as waves eat at the shoreline. Southbound sand flows that would naturally replenish the beach are blocked by the same deep underwater canyon that allows shipping into the Port of Hueneme.
The dredging barge outside the harbor uses a massive spinning bit to dislodge collected sand from the ocean floor. A massive pump sucks the material up in a wet slurry and sends it shooting south to Hueneme Beach.
Isaiah Murtaugh covers Oxnard, Port Hueneme and Camarillo for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at isaiah.murtaugh@vcstar.com or 805-437-0236 and follow him on Twitter @isaiahmurtaugh.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Hueneme Beach dredge nears end
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