“Building a sea wall protects the park facilities by reducing the wave energy that comes in and breaking the energy so that it does not reach the park. However, it actually increases the erosion of the beach. When you build a sea wall you fix the shoreline but in the meantime, you are reducing the beach in front of it, which in turn, is a feedback. If you reduce the beach level and make it steeper, you actually gonna increase the wave energy in front of the shoreline. It is only a short term solution, because over the long term, you increase the energy and erode the beach anyway, which may never come back. It is also bad for the ecosystem. The Grunion comes and spawns on the Goleta Beach from May to July, but if there is no beach they cannot spawn”

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“Beach nourishment is also just a short term solution and it highly depend on where you are. If you are at a location that experiences a strong storm every ten years, then it is a ten-year solution. But if you live here at Goleta, we experience big storms maybe every winter, or even ten times a winter, then it is not a very good solution because sands can be removed so easily after one large storm. It just depends on how frequent your larger storms are and how much material is going to last in that area. In terms of here, in Goleta Beach, very short term, a year or less, depending on where they place it”

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“I can not tell you which strategies are the best. All the solutions are case-by-case depending on the geographic location, the shoreline angle, the sand supply, the costal dunes and the human values. However, we do need sustainable erosion managements here on Goleta Beach. Since the coastal environement is highly dynamic, our sustainable management plan should be flexible and able to be modifid frequently with the changes of coastal environment."

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