Harbor officials report successful Surfers Beach pilot dredge, outline five‑year monitoring plan
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Summary
District staff and consultants told commissioners the Surfers Beach pilot (completed Oct. 29, 2025) dredged 96,000 cubic yards from the East Basin and placed roughly 80,000 cubic yards on Surfers Beach; they reported no permit violations and described a five‑year monitoring program that will track bathymetry, eelgrass recovery and wave behavior.
The San Mateo County Harbor District on April 15 received a detailed post‑construction briefing on the Surfers Beach pilot restoration project and the start of a five‑year monitoring program.
Brad Damitz, who led the post‑construction update for the consultant team, said construction finished on Oct. 29, 2025. He reported that crews removed about 96,000 cubic yards of sand from shoaled areas inside the harbor and that about 80,000 cubic yards of that material were placed on Surfers Beach as beneficial reuse. Damitz said the project included eelgrass mitigation and transplanting and that all staging areas were restored and equipment demobilized. “We had no violations of any of the permit conditions,” he said.
Damitz outlined the monitoring program required by permitting agencies and designed to answer how sand moves at this high‑energy site. Monitoring will include annual bathymetry and beach topography surveys, drone transects, standardized photo points and time‑lapse cameras, a wave buoy offshore, a surf‑line camera analyzed for surfing metrics, sediment grain‑size sampling, and biological monitoring (including eelgrass surveys) carried out by contracted specialists. The first monitoring report to agencies is scheduled for September.
Commissioners asked technical questions about survey depths and whether the district had offshore bathymetry for tracking submerged sand movement. Damitz said the monitoring team is relying on drone RTK surveys, shore‑based transects and instrument data (wave buoy and surf cameras) to infer offshore bathymetry where boat surveys are not deployed. He described the pilot as a demonstration of feasibility for beneficial reuse of dredged sand at a National Marine Sanctuary site and said the permitting precedent should shorten lead times for similar future projects.
Board members and staff emphasized the project’s operational benefits: clearing long‑standing shoals near boat launch ramps and restoring safer navigation, while also delivering short‑term beach width improvements and surf‑break changes that local surfers reported as a positive outcome. Several commissioners urged staff to pursue additional grant funding and to keep partner agencies and the public informed as monitoring results become available.
The district said it will post a detailed post‑construction report and as‑built plans on the project website later this week and will continue monthly updates to the board and partner agencies as monitoring data are collected and analyzed.
