Located along a portion of Stable Road on Maui’s north shore, the 600-foot-long beach has experienced chronic beach erosion and beach retreat with an unusually high rate of beach and land loss from 2006 to 2010. This long term chronic erosion was exacerbated by many years of sand mining which removed sand from the natural littoral cell. The Stable Road Beach Restoration Foundation received permission from Hawai’i DLNR in December, 2007 to conduct a beach restoration project comprised of nourishment and temporary groin placement.
The beach, between Kanaha Beach Park to the west and Kahului Aiport to the east, supports both historic and contemporary recreational activity and use.
The Stable Road Beach Restoration Foundation, Inc. (SRBRFI) was formed by seven Stable Road neighborhood homeowners; it was created solely to restore a portion of beach along the road that was moving towards being completely lost due to chronic beach erosion. According to he University of Hawaii’s Erosion Hazard Rate Map, the area has experienced chronic beach erosion for decades, and the period from 2006 to 2010 saw up to a four-fold increase of the annual erosion rate and beach retreat from the Map. The history of this coastal area includes seven decades of sand mining (for the previous Paia Lime Kiln among other uses) which has reduced the regional sediment supply for natural beach nourishment.
Oceanit provided coastal engineering services for the beach nourishment project. The project was authorized as a Category II Small Scale Beach Nourishment (SSBN) to place 6,500 cubic yards of sand and four geotube groins along the shoreline. The temporary geotube groins were designed to stablize the nourished beach. A marine environmental description of the nearshore area was prepared along with benthic marine biological surveys.
The temporary groins were permitted to remain until June, 2014. Following three years of monitoring, an Environmental Assessment and CDUP application were submitted to the DLNR for approval to replace the temporary sandbag groins with permanent rock groins. With the subsequent approval, rock groins were placed in 2014 in conjunction with county-permitted dune restoration.
