A shark knocked a surfer off of his board off the coast of San Clemente Monday, prompting authorities to close the water to swimmers and others on the busy Memorial Day holiday.

According to city officials, the ocean water was closed off late Monday morning “due to confirmed aggressive shark behavior” in the water in the vicinity of T-Street Beach.

The beaches remained open, but water access was closed until at least 8 p.m. Monday, “pending no additional shark sightings,” according to the city.

City Councilman Chris Duncan told CBS2 that surfers reported the activity to lifeguards, who reviewed surveillance footage and found video of the surfer being knocked off his board.

According to CBS2, officials from the Long Beach State University shark lab were consulted, and they determined the culprit was likely a juvenile great white shark.

No injuries were reported.

Updated 6:29 p.m. May 27, 2024

— City News Service

After heavy storms in January caused rocks and debris to effectively bury train tracks in San Clemente, passenger rail service — including Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner out of San Diego — will resume on Monday, transportation officials announced Tuesday.

Emergency work on a 200-foot-long retaining wall to protect the tracks from additional falling debris at the site of the Jan. 24 landslide near the city-owned Mariposa Trail Pedestrian Bridge is expected to wrap up this week.

Amtrak began offering some limited passenger service on its Pacific Surfliner trains earlier this month, and some freight trains were able to through the affected section at night in recent weeks. However, full service on both Metrolink and Amtrak lines will resume Monday morning.

The railroad tracks in the San Clemente area were also closed last year due to mudslides and debris. The first was in April near the Casa Romantica Culture Center and Gardens, blocking the tracks for a month while repairs were completed.

Another mudslide occurred in the same general area on June 5, prompting another rail closure that lasted nearly six weeks.

Updated nformation on train schedules is available at metrolinktrains.com and at pacificsurfliner.com/alerts.

Limited Amtrak service will resume Wednesday in Orange County through San Clemente, where cliffside erosion has forced multiple shutdowns of rail operations since last year.

Metrolink service, however, is not yet ready to resume through the area.

Construction crews have been building a catchment wall at Mariposa Point to keep debris from rolling onto the tracks.

Amtrak Pacific Surfliner trains will pass through the area without stopping or relying on bus connections. Morning trains will pass through San Clemente between 7 and 8 a.m. with evening trains passing through between 6 and 7 p.m.

Mid-day rail service, however, will not be offered so construction crews can continue shoring up the wall. Bus connections between Irvine and Oceanside will be available for trains 769, 770, 774, 777, 785, and 790 to detour commuters through the construction area.

Construction crews believe they will complete the wall later this month.

Meanwhile, Metrolink will continue taking passengers as far south as the Laguna Niguel-Mission Viejo Station, while weekend Orange County Line and Inland Empire-Orange County Line trains will only go as far south as San Juan Capistrano.

A landslide on private property above the city-owned Mariposa Trail Pedestrian Bridge led to debris on the tracks on Jan. 24, halting all rail service. Some slow-speed freight trains have been moving through the affected section at night in recent weeks while shoring operations continued.

Passengers are being directed to pacificsurfliner.com/alerts and metrolinktrains.com for the latest rail service updates.

City News Service contributed to this article.

Construction crews are scheduled to begin work next Tuesday on a retaining wall to protect trains from landslides north of the San Clemente Pier in Orange County.

Officials from the Orange County Transportation Authority and Metrolink said they expect the wall to be completed by late March, providing rain does not cause disruption.

Initial designs call for a structure 10 to 15 feet tall and 160 feet long, supported by steel beams, each about 30 feet deep.

Passenger traffic on Amtrak and Metrolink trains was halted on Jan. 24, though freight trains were allowed to continue at 10 mph. However, freight traffic is now also halted because of recent movement of soil and debris.

The line is the only rail link from San Diego to the rest of the country, and is considered especially important to supply the Navy and Marines with heavy equipment.

Over the past three years, Southern California’s eroding bluffs have repeatedly forced the closure of the rail line which had operated largely uninterrupted for more than 125 years.

The California Transportation Commission awarded an additional $7.2 million in emergency funds Friday to stop landslides in San Clemente from closing the only railroad link to San Diego.

The money brings to over $9 million the funds available to clean up the latest landslide and build a catchment wall to prevent further damage and make the line safe for Amtrak and Metrolink passenger trains.

BNSF freight trains continue to run intermittently overnight at reduced speed with crews monitoring the cliff slope for movement.

With the latest emergency grant, Metrolink on Friday signed a design-build contract with Condon-Johnson & Associates, a construction firm that has worked on previous emergency rail protection efforts in the San Clemente area.

The rail line was closed through San Clemente on Jan. 24 when a landslide on private property above the city-owned Mariposa Trail Pedestrian Bridge caused major damage to the bridge and scattered debris onto the track.

Over the past three years, San Clemente’s eroding bluffs — on both city and private property — have repeatedly forced the closure of the rail line which had operated largely uninterrupted for more than 125 years.

The looming scenarios that could sever San Diego’s only rail connection to the rest of the United States are haunted by “what-ifs” and lost opportunities that reach back more than four decades.

Last month, crumbling cliffs once again dumped rocks and dirt on the fragile track along San Clemente beaches, disrupting Amtrak’s second busiest corridor, Metrolink commuter service, and freight movement. Officials are scrambling once more to temporarily stabilize the bluffs and advocating a permanent move of the route inland both at San Clemente and farther south at Del Mar, where the cliff-hugging track is within feet of tumbling into the Pacific should ongoing short-term fixes there fail. 

Yet the most optimistic plans target 2035 for completion of a $4 billion inland Del Mar tunnel; those for an alternative in San Clemente are even less developed. The possibility of a long-term interruption is disturbingly real, bringing collateral economic damage to the Port of San Diego where nearly 10% of all cars for American roads arrive for rail shipment nationwide. Tourism would take a big hit and Camp Pendleton would lose a vital transportation artery for moving equipment in a mobilization.

And here are the what-ifs:

 • What if a visionary 1979 bill by the late-San Diego congressman Lionel Van Deerlin and backed by Caltrans Director Adriana Gianturco had passed to appropriate $1 billion and pare Amtrak’s one-way LA-San Diego running times by 30 minutes to just two hours by 1990, competitive with the fastest drive, by relocating the route at Del Mar and San Clemente and fully double-tracking the 120-mile line?

Instead, there was at best tepid support from area leaders and strong opposition from the Santa Fe Railway, rail line owner at the time, and meaningful political backing never materialized. Over the past 40 years, running times have actually ballooned from two-and-a-half hours to three as an increased number of trains too often clog at single-track bottlenecks in San Diego and southern Orange counties.

 • What if promoters who in April 1982 announced a privately-funded and operated Japanese-style bullet train between LA and San Diego had then worked cooperatively with coastal residents and local officials explaining specifics for tunnels and above-ground environmental mitigation? 

Instead, they kept details secret until unveiling an end-of-session bill with powerful leaders in the California legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown that allowed a bypass of major environmental reviews. The immediate blowback poisoned their reception almost everywhere. Distrustful coastline dwellers worried about visual and noise pollution formed powerful anti-bullet-train coalitions, frightening away would-be investors and collapsing the plans in October 1984.

 • What if state and local officials hadn’t recoiled as dramatically as they did following the bullet train fiasco and had considered private-public ventures for train service similar to that now a reality between Miami and Orlando, where a private company runs trains at speeds up to 125 mph, averaging 70 mph on existing railroad rights-of-way and making the 181-mile trip faster than Interstate driving? 

Instead, Southern California planners slow-walked piecemeal improvements county by county over three decades as relatively small pots of federal, state and local funds became available to add track at easy-to-widen sections and replace century-old  bridges. But progress was slowest in San Diego County, with less funding and a greater number of difficult issues, leaving the knottiest hurdles like a Del Mar alternative unscheduled even through 2050, until cliff collapses became a frightening reality.

The state’s focus moved to 220-mph high-speed rail with passage in 2008 of a $9 billion state bond to begin its construction between LA  and San Francisco. Even if mismanagement and false optimism hadn’t quickly doomed the original projections, the subsequent San Diego-LA portion — an inland route via Riverside — would not have entered service until 2040 at the earliest. Imagine how the coastal line might look if as little as a fourth of the $25 billion (and counting) already plowed into a now-truncated 181-mile Merced-Bakersfield project (to open at the earliest in 2030) had been spent in Southern California.

So today the most vexing challenges to a safe and fast coastal rail route envisioned 45 years ago still remain unmet: the threatened segments at Del Mar and San Clemente, the serpentine single track in Soledad Canyon, and the cramped right-of-way through downtown Encinitas.

There are now urgent calls for unified, focused action led by the state’s transportation planning agencies. Let’s demand that this time the past not be prologue to more band-aids. Mother Nature has lost patience; so should the region’s residents.

David Smollar is a former a Los Angeles Times staff writer who covered transportation in Southern California. He lives in Tierrasanta.

Caltrans declared a state of emergency Thursday because of the landslide in San Clemente that has interrupted passenger rail service to San Diego since last week.

The emergency declaration sought by the Orange County Transportation Authority will allow the agency to get up to $10 million in funding to help restore service on the rail line.

The line was closed Jan. 24 after a landslide on private property above the Mariposa Trail Pedestrian Bridge damaged the bridge and left debris on the track.

Amtrak and Metrolink service to San Diego County has been suspended, but freight trains are continuing to operate at reduced speed.

“I’m grateful for the state’s partnership and for recognizing what an important issue this is for regional mobility,” OCTA CEO  Darrell E. Johnson said.

Officials for OCTA and Metrolink are considering how best to attack the problem of landslides in the area.

Later in the day, the agencies announced that the project team will move forward with plans to build a barrier wall to protect tracks from sliding land in San Clemente near the Mariposa pedestrian bridge (Milepost 204.2).

The path forward could include restoring limited passenger rail service during construction of the wall, but no timeline for letting passenger trains run again has been determined.

Updated 8:55 p.m. Feb. 2, 2024

In advance of Thursday’s expected storm, plastic tarp was installed over a San Clemente hillside that gave way in early January, damaging a pedestrian bridge and forcing another suspension of commuter rail service between Orange and San Diego counties.

Metrolink and Amtrak service has been suspended since last Wednesday between the Laguna Niguel/Mission Viejo and Oceanside stations due to the landslide that again sent boulders and debris onto the tracks and damaged the Mariposa Trail Bridge in San Clemente.

There was still no word on when passenger rail would resume, but the tracks have been cleared enough to allow freight trains to use the tracks — at a maximum of 10 mph — during overnight hours this week. Orange County Transportation Authority officials said the tracks were being inspected immediately before freight trains pass through the area to ensure safety.

With heavy rain anticipated Thursday and again early next week, a portion of the saturated hillside was covered with plastic Tuesday, with more plastic covering being installed Wednesday.

As part of the repair work, crews have been installing pipes and ballast to improve water drainage from the hillside in hopes of preventing more saturation of the ground.

OCTA officials said the hillside is continuing to move, but “it has slowed significantly.”

The much-used tracks in San Clemente endured a pair of extended closures last year due to mudslides and debris. The first occurred in April near the Casa Romantica Culture Center and Gardens, blocking the tracks for a month while repairs were completed. Another mudslide occurred in the same general area on June 5, prompting another rail closure that lasted for nearly six weeks.

— City News Service

BNSF freight trains began operating at reduced speed past the latest landslide in San Clemente on Tuesday evening, but the vital rail line remains closed to passenger trains.

The Orange County Transportation Authority said crews have removed sections of a damaged pedestrian bridge, repaired drainage culverts, dumped 30 tons of riprap, and covered a portion of the slope with plastic.

“With these steps, BNSF will once again be allowed to operate freight trains through the area at 10 mph,” the agency said. “Inspections of the track and a confirmation that it is safe to proceed will occur before and after each freight train passes.”

But the agency said the hillside is continuing to move, so there is no timetable yet for passenger rail service to resume.

The landslide near the Mariposa Pedestrian Bridge north of the San Clemente Pier last Wednesday afternoon forced cancellation of both Amtrak and Metrolink trains, with buses temporarily being used in some cases

Over the past three years, San Clemente’s eroding bluffs have repeatedly forced the closure of the rail line which has operated largely uninterrupted for more than 125 years and is especially vital to San Diego’s military installations.

A new landslide in San Clemente on Wednesday temporarily shut passenger train service by Amtrak and Metrolink from Orange County south to San Diego.

“Due to debris falling on the tracks, train service is temporarily suspended in San Clemente. Passengers are being offered bus connections between Irvine and Oceanside for alternative travel during the closure,” Amtrak said.

The landslide was reported at 4:26 p.m. and service was halted shortly afterward. There was no immediate estimate when trains would resume.

Boulders and other debris fell onto the tracks along the Mariposa Trail Bridge in San Clemente. The affected area is a half mile north of the San Clemente Pier Station.

Metrolink said engineering teams are working with Orange County Transportation Authority and city of San Clemente officials to ensure the railroad right of way is safe for travel.

Landslides have repeatedly closed the coastal rail route to passenger trains, though freight traffic has continued at slower speeds. The last incident occurred in the same general area on June 5, prompting a nearly six-week closure.

“With less than one month into the new year, the railroad tracks in South County are already closed due to a landslide in San Clemente,” said Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley. “Decades of climate change denial leaves Orange County behind in a race between us and Mother Earth.”

The corridor is the second busiest rail route in the United States, and Foley said the region “cannot afford for these disruptive service suspensions to continue on a yearly basis.”

Rep. Mike Levin is scheduled to announce major funding to secure the bluffs and relocate sections of the rail track on Thursday. His staff had invited media to travel from San Diego to Los Angeles to observe the problems along the route, but will hold a press conference in Oceanside instead.

Updated at 10:45 a.m., Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024