SanFran Chron

Tampering with sea backfires, local expert warns

Michael McCabe, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, August 14, 2001

Ken Lajoie will never forget the day in 1998 he watched the side of the cliff overlooking the ocean in Pacifica with those cute little houses on top, begin to crumble just as he knew it would sooner or later.

The full fury of El Nino' storms had hit Esplanade Drive residents several days earlier, leaving several Esplanade houses teetering on the edge and residents terrified.

On this day, Lajoie saw a large boulder or two begin to slide beneath Jane Tollini's house.

"I ran to this house and banged on the door," Lajoie said. "I said, 'Ma'am, I think your house is going to fall any minute -- you better get out of there. ' She slammed the door in my face. I think she was in shock."

Lajoie was able to get Tollini's neighbors to persuade her to vacate her beloved home a few minutes later, but his link with the San Mateo County coast was sealed.

"I dropped all my other research then and concentrated on this," he said.

The white-bearded geologist is on a one-man crusade to educate people about the coast and the ocean and how they interact. His simple but blunt message for homeowners, developers and government planners is twofold:

-- Tamper with the coast at your own peril.

-- Living right on its edge often begs catastrophe.

"I don't believe there are natural hazards, just natural processes and conditions," Lajoie said. "We create hazards when we get in the way of those natural processes and conditions."

Along Pacifica's Esplanade Drive, seven houses eventually were demolished, victims of El Nino's smashing power. Although several homeowners talked about rebuilding, data from several geologists, including Lajoie, convinced them that it wasn't worth it.

The dangers of development on the San Mateo County coast were not new to Lajoie that February day in 1998. A senior geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, he had studied the coast largely on his own time for years. He took city officials on a tour of the area two months before El Nino hit, and held public meetings. He published all his data on the geological survey's Web site.

But with his retirement from the U.S. Geological Survey on April Fool's Day,

2000, after exactly 30 years, he now spends considerably more time traveling around the Bay Area spreading the gospel as he sees it.

Using his well-honed slide show on coastal erosion, Lajoie will talk to just about any organization that asks -- as long as the group is "doing good works." And that isn't always easy for a man former colleagues at the geological survey describe as one who doesn't suffer fools gladly, if at all. The show is entitled: "A Tale of two El Ninos: Or a Geological Train Ride down the San Mateo County Coast."

"Everybody considers him Mr. Coastside geology," said Robert Breen, a ranger and aquatic biologist at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Moss Beach. "He has taken a terrific amount of heat from politicians and property owners for saying this very geologically active coast is not a good place to build houses. "

Added John Hamilton, who worked with Lajoie in 1992 while he was at the U.S.

Geological Survey studying the coast: "He has such integrity and passion for his work that sometimes he gets flak from people who don't like his warnings."

During a recent tour of the coast just south of Pillar Point near the Half Moon Bay-El Granada border, Lajoie moved down one of the many beaches he knows as well as his Menlo Park backyard. In a full blow coming off the ocean, he squinted at the cliffs and the waves and the Pillar Point breakwater to the south with a familiarity that comes with making careful measurements and taking photographs of the coastline for more than two decades. At age 62, he is an agile man, well over 6 feet tall, with an impatient pace that covers a lot of ground in a short time.

And although the coast may look timeless to the meditative beachcomber, it is very young in geologic time, only about 5,000 years old, which, Lajoie said,

means that the erosion cycle is still going on. The high, precipitous cliffs along the 45-mile-long San Mateo County coast reflect that.

Nature has been dabbling with the coast for a very long time, assisted by the San Gregorio Fault system, a branch of the San Andreas Fault, that extends from Bolinas south to Point Conception, along with regular winter storms and El Nino storms. In most places there has been a kind of dynamic equilibrium, with little erosion. Lajoie's point -- and there are many geologists who agree with him -- is that in recent years, human interventions in the form of housing developments, roads and harbors -- and futile attempts to protect them -- have upset that delicate balance.

Lajoie points to the Pillar Point breakwater in Half Moon Bay as a perfect example of the way humans get in the way of nature. Completed in 1960 by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers -- he calls it the Army Corps of Disaster -- the breakwater was designed to create a "safe point of refuge" for small vessels.

"By moving the focus of the waves as they hit this part of the beach, you disrupt the equilibrium of the wave pattern and the erosion pattern," he said. "Touch the coast at one point and all hell breaks loose."

The evidence along this part of the coast includes the loss of Mirada Road, just south of an RV park and surfer's beach. Before the breakwater was built, the road jutted much farther west of Highway 1. Today, that part of the road is gone. Pieces of asphalt are scattered about as if it were an archaeological dig site. Further down surfer's beach are faint remnants of a small Mirada Road bridge.

Lajoie noted cracks along the ridgetop above the beach, signs of further erosion to come, and the probable need eventually to rebuild Highway 1 further inland.

The breakwater, Lajoie said, did nothing to prevent erosion of the low, unprotected sea cliffs inside and outside of Pillar Point harbor. Before the breakwater, there was virtually no natural erosion of the low, fragile cliffs; the broad sandy beach protected them from wave attack. The breakwater succeeded only in focusing wave energy on the cliffs -- the ocean merely went around its flanks.

The result: Roads, utilities and private property have been damaged and are still threatened by erosion that in some places averages 33 inches annually.

And so it goes up and down the California coast, Lajoie said. There is nothing wrong with erosion, he said, as long as it is strictly natural. But when man gets in the way, geology is altered and it becomes hazardous, notably to man.

Those who know Lajoie well and have worked with him, do not dispute his message, although some hint that the way he's delivered it, at least when he was at the U.S. Geological Survey, has been less than gentle.

One former colleague, Andrei Sarna-Wojcicki, considers Lajoie to be "verging on brilliant."

"He was fairly openly critical of his colleagues and that got him into trouble," Sarna-Wojcicki said. "But he was one of the first persons to start looking very closely at the San Mateo County coast. He has a tremendous archive of photographs that enable him to estimate the amount of erosion over time. Each time El Nino comes, or a big storm, he goes out there again and looks it over again, very closely."

For his part, Lajoie is impatient with questions such as what should be done. "Another rather incoherent question," he replied to an e-mail. "Stop building structures along eroding coastlines, . . . prevent future construction of seawalls of any type. . . . I support no more coastal protection, period!"

-- Anonymous, August 14, 2001