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How One Storm Ended Oceanside's Golden Age

Forgotten Road With Steve

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For a hundred years, Oceanside, California sold the world the same dream: the finest seaside resort in Southern California, built on a wide golden beach, a grand pier, and pavilion dances under the stars. Then the beach began to vanish, and a single brutal storm got the blame for ending the golden age overnight. But the real killer wasn't the storm — it was a harbor built three miles up the coast in 1942 that quietly strangled the town's sand supply, cubic yard by cubic yard, for the next eighty years. This is the buried story of how a beach town ran out of beach, and why the bones of its first pier still stand in the surf today.

4 Comments

@johnfolsomtroy 14 hours ago

Born in 1950, I grew up in Oceanside. I like this documentary. My only quibble is that a good portion of the photographs were not of Oceanside; one actually slipped through where you can see the word "Delaware." Still, the photos, whether of Oceanside or some other beach town, serve to flesh out the story. Even though the Camp Pendleton harbor was already there, I have dreamy memories of a beach so wide at low tide that a boy could run forever. One could wade 50 yards into the sea and still be in only knee-deep water. It was wonderful. I remember peaks (good waves) all up and down the beach from the pier to St. Malo. The Oceanside Harbor changed all that. The trouble started immediately. Maybe the Marine harbor had started it, but the marina really screwed everything up. The waves walled off; no more peaks. Next thing you knew they were dredging the harbor mouth and piping all this sludge onto the beach. It ruined everything. But oh, those days as a boy, running on the beach at low tide, diving into tide pools...it was heaven.

@christineexum 14 hours ago

GOOD TO KNOW! Ty❤

@christineexum 12 hours ago

Ocean Side is my families beach. ❤

@merrillmilner8717 1 day ago

Face it - purchasing beachfront property is no longer viable, whether it's in Oceanside or up and down the western coast. It's a fool's errand, and the Pacific will always reign supreme.