Dealing With Pier Pressure Has Its Price

Last Jan. 18, as gale-force winds whipped the waves over the decking of the Imperial Beach Pier, Norm Williams huddled in the lee of a building and brooded over the ill wind that had brought an unexpected storm on the day the pier’s reconstruction was set to begin.

Now, as he watches the final touches being put to the 1,300-foot project, he knows it was just nature’s way of cracking a joke. The pier work went speedily and uneventfully, except for a May-to-September break ordered by conservation agencies, which feared that the pile drivers would disturb the endangered California least terns nesting nearby.

By spring, the fishermen will again be at their deep-water posts and a sportfishing enterprise will begin its runs to the Coronado Islands, producing revenues for the city so that the $2.7 million borrowed to pay for the proud new pier can be repaid.

Damaged by Storms

Like most of Southern California’s pleasure piers, the stretch of planks that grace the Imperial Beach shoreline was severely damaged by the storms of the winter of 1982-83, Williams said. The T-shaped end of the old structure became oversize kindling and the pier dwindled in length to 693 feet.

But this new pier is built to take the brunt of waves and winds, equipped with an ocean end shaped like a ship’s prow and tubular steel pilings streamlined to sideslip the force of the tidal surge, Williams said.

In addition, the new portion of the pier slopes upward gradually, so that it stands 31.5 feet above mean low tide level at the tip--high enough that storm waves roaring under the decking can’t lift pier pilings out of their footings.

Williams is not eager for another of those ocean holocausts that struck the Southern California coast in 1979-80 and again in 1982-83; he’s not that eager to test the engineering principles that went into the pier design. But he figures that if another big one does come along, the new pier will still be there.

In the past decade, more than $20 million has gone into patching up or rebuilding Southern California’s 22 pleasure piers, from Santa Barbara south to the Mexican border. Another $37 million in restoration work is planned.

In Ocean Beach, where the 2,000-foot-long concrete pier has stood up to the winter pounding much better than its wooden brethren, the toll of the storms now must be paid. A $1.5-million restoration project begins next spring to arrest the “spalling” that has weakened the structure, said Jim Prescott, a San Diego city civil engineer. In layman’s language, the pier’s cement beams have been chipping, exposing the steel supports embedded in them. Salt air has created rust that is finishing the job the ocean storms started.

Collapse in Seven Years

“It’s in a rapidly deteriorating mode,” Prescott said. Estimates are that the Ocean Beach Pier would crumble and collapse in seven years if the restoration project wasn’t done, he said.

Pacific Beach’s unique Crystal Pier--the only one around with over-the-water tourist cottages--is shipshape again. Storms had weakened the pilings and torn 240 feet off the ocean end of the structure, leaving fishermen out of casting reach of the big ones.

The pilings have been strengthened and the pier extended and elevated so that what happened before won’t happen again. Waves came in under the pier’s boardwalk and lifted it right off.

The 20 pier-top bungalows, which were not damaged, are still popular with Hawaiian tourists who are repeat customers, motel management said.

In La Jolla, Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientists, who should know enough about ocean storms to build a proper pier, have done just that.

The new $4-million structure was built alongside the 71-year-old one, which was then taken down. The new structure, christened the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier, is 1,102 feet long and 5 feet higher above the waves than its predecessor. It is built of wood, but the timbers are treated with petroleum-based preservatives to ward off the ravages of saltwater and of a marine bore, an aquatic termite that attacks untreated timber underpinnings.

Oceanside city officials, building their fifth pier in the past century, think this time they’ve done it right. The $5-million structure reaches 1,942 feet out to sea, where it widens to a platform for a restaurant, featuring seafood entrees, of course.

After years of controversy over whether to try again or to abandon the battered structure, city officials finally reached a consensus that the remaining 900-foot stub should become the key to a beachfront redevelopment effort designed to change Oceanside’s image as a Marine town to that of a resort city.

Times Staff Writer John Spano contributed to this story.