Sediment runoff from burn areas will be trucked to Goleta Beach Park and Carpinteria State Beach again this winter as necessary, according to the Santa Barbara County Public Works Department.
Director Scott McGolpin said there is nowhere else to put it, noting that the county has been looking for a permanent debris disposal site for years with no success.
Trucks will likely haul sediment loads from the Cave Fire burn area debris basins and creek channels to Goleta, while Thomas Fire-area loads will go to Carpinteria.
The county trucked loads to both beaches in 2018, following the Montecito debris flows, and last year, and also sent loads to landfills locally and out of the area.
Public Works has emergency permits from last year’s storm season, and notified regulatory agencies that beach disposal will happen again this year, said Maureen Spencer, operations and environmental manager for the Water Resources division.
Spencer said the county has already been sending samples from San Antonio Creek’s debris basins to a lab, and test results have been “all good, all clean.”
Additional testing, of the debris itself and water quality, is required during beach disposal.
Weekly reports are sent to the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, including sediment sampling results, material estimates and work site photos.
The county has been depositing material on Goleta Beach since 1994, with de-silting of Goleta Slough, and its monitoring program of beach and bay environments started in the early 2000s, Spencer said.
The monitoring includes the study of kelp, surf grass, eel grass, invertebrates, and how the habitats react to new and different sediment over time, she said.
The beach at Goleta Beach Park has expanded since post-storm disposal started there, McGolpin said – so much so that the Parks Department moved a lifeguard tower west, toward UCSB, last summer.
This winter, some of the disposal will move farther east, but still on the UCSB side of the entrance bridge, to “help the beach out there,” he said.
Santa Barbara Channelkeeper monitored water clarity in the Goleta Beach bay last year, and plans to do so again when disposal operations start, said science and policy director Ben Pitterle.
The organization is concerned about the sediment beach disposal because some of the material is significantly different than beach sand, and could affect water quality and marine habitats, he said.
“Storms carry the same sort of material out into the ocean all the time, but storms typically only last a couple of days and water quality clears up within 72 hours,” Pitterle said.
“County disposal operations can persist for six weeks or more, deposited material can rest on the seafloor, impacting water quality for longer, which all can cause long-term impacts to water quality.”
He said Channelkeeper advocates for more monitoring and limiting disposal operations to a shorter period of time, not weeks at a time as it has happened in past years.
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.