OVERLOOKED

Much has been made of the coming armageddon when California will be pounded by rain for a whole month as a monster Pineapple Express will send a vast river crashing into California.  The New York Times made much of it as they do like to feature California catastrophes.  While there will be terrible flooding and other bad stories one thing was neglected.  A month of rain storms crashing into the coast is going to do very great damage to our beaches.  Cliffs will erode, sand will vanish and beaches will be one of the great losses.  The Coastal Commission may welcome some of this with its policy of managed retreat.  This will not exactly be managed but it may well bring about retreat in places such as Imperial Beach which is regularly inundated by high tides.  Local communities will call for more barriers to the sea but they are expensive and by now well known not to work.  The next storm will undermine them and render them useless.  Sand mining on a heroic scale will also be called for but here again there is only so much sand and not all in the right places and that costs money also.  So Bad Times ahead for beaches.  I can only hope that when more stories are written about the storms to come  some note will be taken of the damage to our beaches.