Kailua Beach Management Plan
Kailua Beach Management Plan
Expected Completion Date: 2010
Client: State of Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources
& Hawaii Sea Grant Program
Kailua Beach, located on the windward coast of the island of O'ahu, Hawai'i. Kailua Beach fronts Kailua Bay and is a wide, crescent-shaped sand beach that stretches approximately 2.6 miles between two rocky points. Most of the beach abuts residential single-family homes, but it also has two beach parks and several public right-of-way to the beach.
Kailua Beach is well known for its scenic beauty and recreational value and is widely marketed as a visitor attraction. Its shallow clear waters, gentle waves, soft white sands, and absence of coral or rock bottoms make this beach amenable to a wide variety of age groups, users, and activities. Most of the beach is accreting, but the southern end is eroding.
The purpose of the Kailua Beach Management Plan is to identify policies, regulatory measures and other intervention strategies and programs to address land accretion claims and physical encroachments into the dunes by adjoining private landowners and long-term issues, such as the projected effects for sea-level rise on the future location of the shoreline. PlanPacific was selected to lead the consultant team, which included the technical support of Sea Engineering, Inc. and the University of Hawai'i's School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology.
(Above) Several decades ago, the Department of Parks and Recreation installed an experimental “sandgrabber” in an attempt to abate erosion fronting Kailua Beach Park. The recommended strategy for beach management is instead to replenish this portion of the beach with migrated sand deposits from the mouth of nearby Kaelepulu Stream when the periodic maintenance dredging of stream occurs. ||read more : page two ||