A wealthy beachside town in California is running out of sand. The situation is so desperate, city officials have started scouring the Pacific Ocean looking for a new source.
The San Clemente City Council approved a nearly $800,000 contract last week with an engineering firm to hunt for millions of cubic yards of sand to restore the city’s beaches. San Clemente is already spending millions of dollars a year bringing sand to its beaches, but it has now run out of good locations to collect sand.
Transporting sand to the coast is an expensive endeavor and becomes even pricier if the sand is far away from the delivery site. The city has two planned beach replenishment projects in the works, with the intention to deliver 1.5 million pounds of sand to area beaches, but neither project has an approved sand source, according to an Oct. 15 agenda report …