Most mornings when I step out of my San Francisco apartment, I hear the waves, the seagulls, and occasionally kids yelling out the window across the street. But over the past few weeks, the murmur of Ocean Beach has been cut with a low mechanistic rumble. Walk a few blocks and pop your head over the sand dunes and you’ll find the culprits: orange-yellow tractors piling sand into dump trucks, which caravan three miles south and spit out the sand—50,000 cubic yards, or 75,000 tons, of it in total—back on the beach.
That sandy exodus is part of San Francisco’s campaign to fight severe erosion at the southern end of the beach that faces the Pacific Ocean. During a big storm, the bluffs can lose 25 to 40 feet—which might be fine, if the city’s wastewater infrastructure didn’t run right alongside the beach. Specifically, a 14-foot-wide pipe that ferries both stormwater and sewage. If the sea steals the Earth that supports it, the thing could well snap.
The problem at Ocean Beach will only get worse, because the sea has nothing to do but rise in this era of rapid climate change. So will San Francisco spend the rest of its days shoveling sand in a quixotic battle against inevitability? Far from it—it’s all part of a plan to adapt to inevitability, which could set precedent for how this and other coastal cities fight rising seas.
Climate change modeling is complicated: It takes burly supercomputers crunching a galaxy of variables to understand, say, how a warming arctic might be mucking with weather in the United States. But sea level rise? “It's the one area in climate change that's probably more understood than others,” says Anna Roche, project manager at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which is overseeing the digging. “We actually have calculations for how much sea level rise we're anticipating, and you can start making decisions on actual numbers, versus more just pie-in-the-sky discussions.”
Which is not to say those decisions come easy at Ocean Beach. “There's the whole jurisdictional puzzle,” says Ben Grant, urban design policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. The National Parks Service runs the beach, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department owns the road that runs along it, and it’s all under the regulatory purview of the California Coastal Commission. “There's just all these different components that need to be considered and balanced.”