A whiff of charred wood comes off the piles of black mud that are dumped daily into the ocean at Goleta Beach County Park, part of the cleanup of Montecito in the wake of the catastrophic January 9 debris flow. It’s mud from the Thomas Fire burn area in the mountains behind the community, and, according to Seth Shank, a senior environmental planner with County Flood Control, it will look like beach sand within 24 hours.
“Beach nourishment, that’s what we call it,” he said, noting that there is now a strip of sand at high tide where there had been none in recent years. “You can smell the fire, but it’s really beach-compatible — coarse-grained and sandy without a lot of clay.”
The beach may be coming back, but the water’s unhealthy. Swimming and surfing are off-limits at Goleta Beach, Arroyo Burro Beach, Carpinteria State Beach, El Capitan State Beach, Hope Ranch Beach, Leadbetter Beach, Summerland Beach, and Hammond’s Beach because of high levels of bacteria in the water, County Public Health officials said on Wednesday. The county is conducting weekly ocean water sampling along the coast.