Celebrity Castles In The Sand-Involuntary Lessons In Climate Change
Increasing weather strength and rising ocean levels doom this effort long term. The engineering to turn this around is just too much. I suspect that these home sites will be abandoned eventually.
To me the real story is how incidents like this will force the wealthiest to confront the truth of climate change. Will that sway the critics among them? These communities are not just entertainment celebrity hubs. The wealthy (corporate or not) love the sea and the view. What happens when oil company executives suddenly have to pay engineers in futile efforts to push the water back.
On Broad Beach, slim progress on restoring sand
By Martha Groves, Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2013, 4:10 p.m.
Time was that Malibu’s celebrity-studded Broad Beach lived up to its name. Not anymore.
In recent years, punishing winter storms and high tides have swept away much of the 1.1-mile oceanfront lined with the multimillion-dollar getaways of such notables as Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, Pierce Brosnan and businessman-philanthropist Patrick Soon-Shiong.
To protect their seaside showplaces, residents have piled sandbags and built a massive emergency rock wall. Now, under orders from state coastal officials, they are fighting against time to seek a more permanent solution — permanent being relative in an era of rising seas and extreme weather.
They have spent millions of dollars on attorneys, engineers and environmental consultants who have scoured the coast from Mexico to Canada for a mountain of sand that could be dredged and moved to restore the beach to its original 100-foot to 150-foot width.
“The [wall] is perilously close to certain homes,” said Kenneth A. Ehrlich, an attorney for the homeowners. “The homes are certainly in danger. [And] there’s a bigger issue that no one seems to focus on: There’s no beach right now that anyone can enjoy.”