Workers have finished their two-month dredging of the Oceanside harbor, leaving a fresh coat of sand on beaches as the summer tourist season gets under way.

The annual project keeps the entrance to the busy harbor deep enough for safe navigation. The sediment thats harvested is pumped onto nearby beaches to replace whats lost to winter storms and strong currents.

This years haul was a bumper crop at least 420,000 cubic yards of sand deposited along the citys shoreline from the harbor to south of Oceanside municipal pier, said Greg Fuderer, spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The exact amount should be determined by surveys later in the week.

One of the big things was to make sure to build up (the beach) around the pier area and the park at Surfrider Way, Fuderer said Monday.

More sand makes more room on the beach for tourists and surfers, and helps to protect oceanfront streets such as The Strand, as well as homes, hotels and public parks from coastal erosion.

This year, longtime contractor Manson Construction of Seattle returned to do the work, replacing a different company that was hired to do the dredging last year. That contractor, CJW Construction, started later in the year after difficulties getting permits and then had equipment problems that stretched the work through the summer. In the end, less sand was removed and the beach was crowded with pipes, bulldozers and other equipment for most of the tourist season.

We had kind of a lost summer because we didnt have the beach, Oceanside Councilman Jerry Kern said Tuesday.

This year Manson which started dredging the mouth of the harbor in April also ran into some trouble, with stormy weather and rough seas that knocked an important piece of heavy equipment off the work barge. As a result, the dredging was extended about two weeks past the usual Memorial Day deadline to get additional sand requested by the city of Oceanside and the U.S. Navy.

Still, officials were pleased with the results.

It looks really nice, Kern said. The last few years we never got past the pier. Its at least 50 or 60 percent more (sand) than what we did in the past.

The Army Corps base contract with Manson called for dredging a total of 280,000 cubic yards of sand at a cost of $3.7 million. The city kicked in an additional $600,000 to get 80,000 more cubic yards, and the Navy an additional $625,000 to dredge 70,000 more cubic yards. The Navys boat basin at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base shares its entrance with the Oceanside harbor.

I wish we had done it last year, Kern said of the citys decision to pay for more sand.

Manson is expected to return next spring for the second year of a three-year contract.

The large steel pipes the contractor used to pump the sand across the beach between the harbor and the San Luis Rey River have been left buried in place to save the costs of removing, storing and replacing them, Fuderer said.

Other pipes used south of the river will be capped at the ends so that they float, and will then be hauled into the ocean and towed away to another job along the coast, he said.

Dredging opens the harbor entrance to a depth of 25 feet or more. Ocean currents constantly push sand into it, and sometimes before dredging it gets as shallow as 8 or 10 feet deep. Shallow water increases the size of waves, creating a hazard for small boats.

Oceanside voters approved construction of the harbor in 1960, according an article by local historian Kristi Hawthorne posted on the citys Chamber of Commerce website.

Officials broke ground in 1961, and the harbor was completed in 1963 with 520 boat slips at a cost of about $7 million, it states. All slips are taken, with a waiting list of more than 100 names.

philip.diehl@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @phildiehl

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Big beaches are back in Oceanside - The San Diego Union-Tribune