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A lagoon and shoreline in Del Mar, California, with the ocean in the distance

Del Mar wants to triple lagoon dredging as Encinitas looks north for the sand

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The shoreline at Del Mar, near San Dieguito Lagoon, where officials have declared an emergency over sand blocking the inlet. Photo: Sergei Gussev, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Del Mar declared a local emergency on Sept. 22 over sand piling up at the mouth of San Dieguito Lagoon, a blockage officials fear could worsen winter flooding, and the city has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to let it dredge far more material than its current permit allows. The Coast News, in an Oct. 15 report, said the City Council wants the Corps to raise the cap from 16,000 cubic yards per dredge to 50,000, more than triple the present limit. The paper said the total amount of sand at the inlet is still unknown. Southern California Edison, which maintains the lagoon as mitigation for the closed San Onofre nuclear plant, expects to remove about 15,000 cubic yards this fall, a utility spokesperson told the paper. Del Mar has said Edison’s separately permitted operation allows removal of up to 20,000 cubic yards.

Two Encinitas coastal advocates, Leucadia resident Gary Murphy and former city coastal administrator Kathy Weldon, want some of that dredged sand hauled north to eroding beaches at Grandview, Stonesteps and Beacon’s, and eventually to a shared program with Carlsbad and Solana Beach. “The goal is trying to rebuild the beach back up so there’s some buffer when the big waves do come,” Weldon told The Coast News. “We’re trying to recycle the sand and keep it in the same system.” Murphy said an earlier idea of placing about 70,000 cubic yards was based on unverified estimates, and that “there may be an extra 10,000 yards that Encinitas may be able to grab.”

Assistant City Manager Clem Brown had previously told the Del Mar council that when the inlet narrows or closes, the lagoon cannot take in storm surge and rain as well, raising flood risk in low-lying neighborhoods, The Coast News reported. City officials have also worried about what happens if Lake Hodges fills and overflows into the San Dieguito River. The paper cited SANDAG’s 2025 shoreline monitoring report, which found that Encinitas and Leucadia beaches have kept losing sand: by fall 2025, the average shoreline in that study area had retreated 40 feet since 2000, and the beaches and nearshore holdings were down 29 cubic yards of sand per foot of shoreline.

Moving the material will not be simple. Walt Jellison, president and general manager of Pacific Dredge & Construction, told the paper that San Dieguito Lagoon has a lot of cobble, including rocks the size of bowling balls that can clog pumps, which limits how much of the material is even usable on a beach. He said barging sand offshore is possible but can be hard to justify on a relatively small job. The Corps has not, in The Coast News account, already approved the jump from 16,000 to 50,000 cubic yards. Until that changes, Edison’s smaller fall dredge is the work actually scheduled, and Encinitas’s hope of taking leftover sand north remains a request, not a plan with a date.

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