Last U.S. sand mine gobbling coastline
Mexico’s Cemex plant, vestige of early 20th century industry, is undermining vast swath of pristine beach at Monterey Bay
MARINA, Monterey County — The white pilothouse poking above the dunes on a remote beach in Monterey Bay is the first sign to visitors of an anachronistic industry that critics say is eating away California’s quintessential seacoast.
There, surrounded by dune grass, on the outskirts of this tiny community, is a dredging boat with rusting anchors and a hydraulic pipeline that stretches toward an inland factory building, where plumes of steam rise from a chimney.
The rig sucks up a slurry of sand and seawater that comes in with the tide and pipes it to the plant, where the granules are washed, graded, dried and taken out on trucks destined for golf course bunkers and less romantic consumer products like filtration systems, stucco and grout.
The Lapis Sand Plant, in operation since 1906, is the nation’s last coastal sand mine. It is believed to extract roughly 270,000 cubic yards of sand per year from a dredging pond on the beach, according to geologists and oceanographers who have studied the impacts. That’s the equivalent of a large dump truck load every half hour, 24 hours a day.
The 8-acre mine has been described by opponents, including politicians and surveyors, as “medieval” and “outrageous,” and some studies have linked it to severe erosion on the southern Monterey shoreline. But a quirk in the law has allowed the plant to remain open 27 years after all the other sand dredges were ordered off the coast.
The owner, Cemex, based in Mexico, has positioned its dredge in an artificial lagoon just above the mean high tide line, which is the boundary between public and private land under the California Coastal Act. It is therefore outside the jurisdiction of the State Lands Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which can regulate industry in the surf zone.
The California Coastal Commission has threatened to close the plant, but the company refuses to relinquish its claim to the uniquely coarse ambercolored Monterey sand, which it calls “Lapis Lustre.”
“The Lapis plant continues to operate within Cemex’s legal entitlements as it has for decades,” said Walker Robinson, a spokesman for Cemex, which owns 400 acres of the surrounding dunes. “Cemex is not aware of credible evidence to substantiate claims of erosion.”
The company’s intransigence has caused a furor among conservationists, who can’t fathom the exploitation of such a precious natural resource.
“This is a pristine beach that is slowly being taken away by this sand mine,” said Edward Thornton, a professor emeritus at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, as he pointed out the dredge’s handiwork — a massive cavity on the beach — on a recent day.
“I think it should have been shut down a long time ago,” said the 77-year-old coastal engineer. “They are raping the coastline for this sand, a public resource that they don’t pay a cent for.”
The Coastal Commission, which regulates development along the coast, sent a notice of intent to file a cease-and-desist order to Cemex on March 17, 2016, accusing the company of failing to obtain a development permit for grading the beach, building a dredging pond and removing sand.
The commission argues that state and federal regulators have jurisdiction over the dredge site because high tides regularly bring in sand from the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary to replenish the pond.
“The operation of the dredge pond impacts resources both above and below the mean high tide line,” said Noaki Schwartz, a Coastal Commission spokeswoman.
But getting rid of the mine won’t be easy. Cemex is the world’s second largest building materials company, and any attempt to kick it out is likely to immerse the state in years of expensive litigation.
Robinson argues the company has a vested right to continue gathering sand based on its history on the beach that dates to long before the Coastal Act was passed in 1976. Not only that, he said, but the company has been fixing up the dunes and improving habitat as part of a reclamation plan with the Coastal Commission and other state agencies.
“The operation dredges only sand that is washed into a pond by high tides,” Robinson said. “The rest of the site has well-preserved dunes. We are working with biologists to preserve the habitat and protect the snowy plovers there.”
Ximena Waissbluth, a local coordinator for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation, said she was astonished by Cemex’s argument that no harm is being done because only sand above the high tide line is being taken.
“It’s not a magic pond,” Waissbluth said. “The sand doesn’t appear from nowhere.”
Sand dredging was once big business along the 31-mile coastline, which stretches from Santa Cruz to Monterey. There were mines in Carmel and north of Point Lobos as far back as 1902. The Lapis mine was opened as a pit quarry in 1906.
The operation eventually sold to Lone Star Industries, which established a dredge pond in the dunes in 1959. It was one of six sand mining operations in Monterey Bay in the 1980s, three in Marina and three in Sand City. The others used claw-like scrapers to scoop up sand.
Gary Griggs, a coastal geologist and the director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said he detected dune erosion of about 6 to 7 feet per year in some spots in the 1980s, one of the highest rates in the state. That erosion prompted a public outcry and a crackdown on sand mining.
In 1990, the Army Corps shut down the five other mines, but the Lapis plant was allowed to remain, because it was out of the corps’ jurisdiction. It was still sucking up tons of sand when Cemex purchased it in 2005, and the extractions continued largely unnoticed by the public or regulators.
“It’s on an isolated stretch of the coast, and the average person didn’t know what was going on,” Griggs said. “But then you start seeing the erosion.”
The U.S. Geological Survey found in 2006 that southern Monterey Bay had one of the highest average rates of erosion in California. Thornton coauthored the 2008 Coastal Regional Sediment Management Plan, which linked the erosion to sand mining.
He said the southern Monterey Bay shoreline should be growing at a rate of 3 feet a year. But his 2015 study published in the journal Marine Geology, which assessed historic erosion and the factors behind it, found the shore was instead retreating 4 feet a year.
“The natural state of the shoreline now, if there was no sand mining, would be growing,” Thornton said. “We find that sand mining is really the sole source of the loss of coarse sand.”
The new evidence, covered extensively by the Monterey County Weekly, riled up residents and city officials in Marina and Monterey. Surfrider and other environmental groups organized showings of the film “Sand Wars,” which illustrates how sand mining has ruined coastlines around the world and contributed to the disappearance of 25 Indonesian islands.
Robinson said the research linking the Lapis plant to erosion is based on “incorrect or speculative data” that disregards other factors.
Cemex does not disclose how much sand it takes from the beach, but Thornton believes the company has increased production over the years to about 270,000 cubic yards a year, approximately the same amount that all six companies together were mining three decades ago.
He wrote a letter to the Coastal Commission in 2009 outlining his concerns. While the commission has since taken up the matter, no hearings have been set.
“It is a top priority of our commission to find a solution here,” said Justin Buhr, an enforcement analyst who is in charge of the commission’s dredging investigation. “We’ve been talking with Cemex for some time, and we will continue to talk to them to see if we can resolve all the issues through a consensual resolution.”
Many locals wonder why it took so long for the commission to wade into the controversy.
“How could an agency as powerful as the Coastal Commission — which takes you to the wall when you want to put rocks on your property — be powerless to stop the biggest, most damaging operation on the coast?” Griggs asked.
Charles Lester, the executive director of the commission before his controversial ouster in February 2016, said the state budget crisis, which forced the furlough of workers, had a lot to do with the enforcement delay. Once the economy improved, he said, the Lapis plant became a top priority.
“I was concerned about it, which is why I elevated it,” Lester said during a recent meeting in Capitola. “I thought it was an important case so I said, ‘Let’s hit it harder.’ ”
The commission’s letter threatening a cease-and-desist order came out shortly after Lester’s firing. A year has passed since then.
For those impatient for a solution, there has been talk about buying the property and donating it to an adjacent state or regional park. But nobody has stepped forward to make an offer.
Meanwhile, sacks of Lapis Lustre — advertised as cleaned, graded and kiln-dried — are available at the Home Depot in Colma. Fifty pounds of “Monterey Sands” can be purchased for $4.40.