In 1938, the yoga teacher Paramahansa Yogananda dedicated the Golden Lotus Temple along the Encinitas coast.
As an impending cliff collapse became clear just a few years later, Yogananda — also known as Swami and for whom a famous surf spot is named — was tempted to hold a last service in the temple but decided not to risk the lives of his congregation.
In 1942, the collapse happened. The old temple, teetering on the side of the fallen bluff, was removed.
Decades later, a pool at Swami’s is left empty, a reverend there told the Union-Tribune, because of worries the water would be too much weight and could contribute to another landslide.
Others have not been as judicious. In the decades since the temple slid off the cliff, more houses have been built along the coast, altering the landscape and, perhaps, endangering those who live there and below.
Of course, erosion has happened long before humans started building houses along the ocean. It’s caused primarily by wind and water. Some water is natural — waves and runoff, for instance. Other water is unnatural, like leaking water systems that weaken the ground, or the rising seas caused by human-made climate change.
On Friday, the catastrophic consequences of cliff collapses again became clear when a bluff near Encinitas collapsed and killed three people.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Adam Young, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher who studies coastal erosion. If you’ve read any articles on the recent bluff collapse, you’ve probably seen Young say cliff failures have several causes and that he can’t speculate on why the cliffs near Encinitas fell when they did.
“Technically, all cliffs are eroding,” he told me at the time.
Indeed, one of Young’s key findings is sure to frustrate our search for an obvious crystal ball about what places to avoid. He found that cliffs that had lots of erosion in the past were eroding less now, and cliffs without a history of major erosion could erode a lot more. As a press release summarizing the study pointed out, “These are key findings, because models predicting future cliff retreat are often based on projecting the historical rates.”
In his research, Young has looked over a litany of major erosion events. He talks about them with the precision of a sports geek recalling box scores from baseball games played back in the days of radio. His vault includes the temple collapse in Encinitas and the recent hot spots up and down the San Diego coast, where parking lots and campgrounds and railroad tracks that might look at first like any other are beginning to crumble.
Young said we’ve manipulated our coastline so much it’s very hard to separate what we’ve done from the natural processes, in part because there isn’t good historical records that show exactly how cliffs used to look.
The California Coastal Records Project has detailed photos of the coast going back to the 1970s, but the images, taken from a helicopter, are far from perfect and 50 years isn’t a lot of time, geologically speaking. Lots of research is being done using modern radar imaging, which can show coastal geology down to the rock. But, of course, it only shows what the bluffs look like now, not how they used to be.
Last week’s deaths were far from the first. In 2008, a tourist from Nevada was killed when a bluff collapsed near Torrey Pines. A year later, rocks fell again in the same area near what’s called Bathtub Rock.
Just a few weeks ago, I was walking near that area of the beach, which is now open and a seemingly good site for selfies, which tourists were taking. But getting there from the parking lot on the north end of the beach, I noticed a large rock atop a cliff. It seemed to be half on the ground and half in the air, waiting to fall eventually.
- On Monday, local officials and former Padres player Trevor Hoffman talked up a development along the bluffs in Del Mar. (NBC San Diego)
In Other News
- The Desert Sun explores how Cal Fire San Diego County Unit Chief Tony Mecham supports some new development in areas at risk for wildfires. Some fire scientists question this approach. We’ve reported on the chief’s approach to development and on the building industry’s argument that putting new homes in wildfire-prone areas may help reduce the wildfire risk there, if the homes are built with fire resistance in mind. The local Cal Fire union also recently endorsed the Newland Sierra project, a controversial development near San Marcos.
- There’s been a few long, long reads on last year’s Camp Fire, one in California Sunday Magazine and the other in The New York Times Magazine.
- This is an awesome, awesome series of graphics showing when people stay at various National Parks.
- Sacramento Bee reporter Dale Kasler has this eye-opening story: “For the past decade, electricity traders and generators have taken advantage of a little-known wrinkle in California’s energy market to extract more than $866 million from the state’s power grid.”