The Surfrider Foundation in Long Beach have been advocates for clean water and restoring healthy beaches to Long Beach for over 10 years. I'm the chair of this chapter. I don't surf. I just want to go swimming at my local beach and not worry about the water quality. The focus of our campaign is reconfiguring the Long Beach portion of the federal breakwater that lies off our shore. Our city council voted in July 2005 to ask for federal funding ($100,000) on a breakwter study. The idea is to see if the feds, by way of the Army Corps of Engineers, would have an interest in reconfiguring the breakwater.
The study has been stalled due to lack of funding - it seems our local Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, doesn't support this project. Surfrider has been looking for alternate funding for the past two years and no one has stepped up to the plate. Next week's City Council meeting (7/24) will have an agenda item calling on the council to allocate the use of $150,000 from the Tidelands Fund to fund this study.
Please come to the July 24 City Council meeting - 5PM at 333 W. Ocean Blvd. - to support this motion and show your city council that you're tired of stinky beaches and unhealthy water.
More talk on the Breakwater
There's been lot's of talk about the breakwater lately. What have you heard? How Strongly do you feel about this Issue? What do you know about it? Share your opinion, by taking our poll -it's on the front page...
In no particular order, here's some intersting tid bit's.. please add to them, post your thoughts, did I get something wrong? Let me know.
Other Interesting Stuff:
CSULB- Daily 49er - Comprehensive Article on the subject
About Naples History
Click on the keyword "breakwater" on any post (like the story above), to find everything posted with the "breakwater" keyword.
Breakwater
I'm undecided on the breakwater and looking forward to the results of a study - providing it's a genuinely neutral study and not one that is predetermined to advance the arguments of one side or the other.
Mike Stewart's comments contain some misleading and erroneous information.
First, following his link to "worse beachwater in California" does say that Long Beach recently fared poorly, but reading the articles shows that that is an exception. Quoting from one:
"Long Beach has traditionally fared well in the Beach Report Card despite the fact its beaches are completely enclosed by a breakwater. Typically, beaches located inside a breakwall are more prone to poor water quality than open ocean beaches, but this has not been an issue for Long Beach except at Colorado Lagoon."
Second, $1 million a square foot? Rocks aren't sold by the square foot. Cubic feet maybe? Even so, the value quoted is utterly absurd. It would be cheaper to use gold. Perhaps you meant $1 million total.
Misleading comments about the Breakwater
I didnt mean to mislead in my previous post. It's why I provided the links to my sources on the web. My intention isn't to push a particular view as much as to debunk some local myth's. Both for and against. But I'd prefer to ge it right, so if you know of something else, please let me know... I will correct the post.
The water quality search is factual... I'm not sure what is misleading. I didn't imply anything other than do the search yourself. The really good news here is the culprit of some of the most contaminated water may finally have been identified (in short: seems to be storm drain pumps and sprinkler runoff ...in the dry summer following the driest year on record, go figure).
I misquoted the value of the rocks in terms of square feet - it should have been linear feet. I did provide the link to the CSULB 49ers article.
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