San Clemente : Firm Agrees to Eliminate Hump in the City’s Pier

San Clemente’s humpbacked pier will soon be restored to normal--at the expense of the contractor responsible for the glitch. The City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to have a 15-inch bulge near the end of the 1,275-foot pier corrected, with Long Beach-based Healy Tibbetts Co. footing the bill.

Although no specific amount of money has been established for the correction, Healy Tibbetts acknowledged its mistake and will begin the corrections immediately, according to San Clemente City Manager Jim Hendrickson.

Fortunately for local residents, although the corrections will delay completion of the pier’s restoration by 60 days, they will force the closure of only the last 160 feet of the structure. “We’ll try our best not to close the pier,” said Gideon Felisan, associate civil engineer for the city.

The San Clemente pier, like its counterparts in Seal Beach and Huntington Beach, was a victim of the severe winter storms of 1983. About 300 feet of the pier was washed away along with an 80-foot section near the shore. A $1.3-million restoration project, funded by federal, state, county and local agencies, as well as by local residents, set to the task of restoring the local landmark.

Plans drafted by the Long Beach marine engineering firm of Moffatt & Nichol called for the rebuilt pier to be 23.75-feet high for the first 800 feet before rising incrementally, leaving the last 400 feet of the structure about 3.6 feet higher than the rest, said Jim Crumpley, project engineer for Moffatt & Nichol. The rise, he said, would keep the end of the pier well above the breakers in the event of another storm like the one that washed the pier away.

Something went wrong, however. Felisan said that inadequate tools, faulty measuring instruments and possibly a little carelessness on the part of workers led to surveying errors, which caused the end of the pier to drop 15 inches lower than it was supposed to, leaving a visible bulge.

City inspectors apparently didn’t catch the mistake, Felisan said. The city found out about the mistake in mid-March from local residents who called to say the pier had a bulge. “I was not aware of the mistake until the city engineer told me he received calls from people over the configuration of the pier.”

Although the bulge is “strictly cosmetic,” and has no real effect on the pier, he said, work to correct the mistake will soon be under way.