Unstable Cliffs News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Glenn Steiner Three months ago, a twenty-year-old sailor fell thirty feet to his death from the gritty cliff surface near the intersection of Froude Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. “We used to average about a hundred calls a year,” he says, “but in 1986 it was down to sixty-nine, and in 1987, there were only forty-three.” These figures include all cliff rescue calls on city beaches, of which accidents on Sunset Cliffs account for roughly one-fifth. Karns attributes the decrease to signs posted along the cliffs: Unstable Cliffs — Stay Back, Frequent Cave-ins, Sheer Drop-off, and ...

Photograph by Matthew Suárez What needs protecting? The beach and the bluff. Both things make the coast and the coast is being ravaged. The Sand at Encinitas Jayme Timberlake — tide-watcher, restoration ecologist, avid surfer — light-foots it down Encinitas’s iconic Stone Steps. She’s barefoot, having kicked off her shoes and left them on the sand-dusted floor of her truck cab. Desk-chained me follows, white legs and black tennies. We gaze up at the sentinel sandstone cliff-backs beside us and their telltale, sharp-edged furrows (or rills) of erosion. The sight feels perilous: 100-fo...