A Pier with Few Peers Going Up in Oceanside

Plank by plank, piling by piling, there’s a pier taking shape on the seashore here.

Work began in earnest last week on Oceanside’s pier, a 1,942-foot structure that will replace a wave-racked predecessor that had fallen victim to the ocean.

But this, mind you, won’t be just another set of pretty pilings. It’ll be a pier with few peers.

City officials boast that the pier, expected to be completed by next summer, will be a state-of-the-art structure and the undisputed centerpiece of Oceanside’s blossoming oceanfront.

“We’ve taken the positive aspects from all the piers that have been built over the past few years and integrated them in this one,” said Dick Watenpaugh, city recreation director and one of the officials overseeing the project. “When it’s finished, we’ll have a very high-tech pier.”

To begin with, the pier will be higher off the surf, enabling it to escape some of the piling-crunching waves from fierce winter storms. In addition, workers will encase traditional wooden pilings with hard plastic coatings to more effectively ward off the day-to-day grind of sand moving with the swells.

Officials hope the $5-million waterfront edifice will help civic revitalization efforts, luring visitors who in recent decades have avoided the rundown area around the pier.

“It’ll be one of the big draws,” Watenpaugh said.

But building a structure suspended above waves a quarter mile out at sea is no easy task, and the Oceanside project has a few added engineering oddities. Glenn Prentice, the city’s public works director, described the construction effort as being akin to erecting a building with the original structure still standing in place.

A 900-foot stretch of the old municipal fishing pier that was spared by the waves will be used by workmen as a perch for their heavy equipment as they drive wooden supports deep into the ocean floor, working their way outward from the shoreline.

Once the pier is built, scuba divers will use underwater buzz saws to cut down the old pilings. The hefty timbers will then be floated to shore.

The new pier will be the fifth one at that location in Oceanside. Historians do not know when the first pier was built but say it was replaced in 1894, when city officials spent $1,200 building the second one. That one eventually fell to the waves, and a wood and steel pier replaced it in 1927. Even steel proved vulnerable to the ocean, and a wooden pier was erected in 1947.

Winter waves lopped off about 600 feet of that pier in 1978, and a 110-foot section fell in 1983.

Eager to rebuild the structure, city officials placed a measure on the ballot in November, 1983, to fund much of the cost of rebuilding the pier, but voters rejected it.

Despite that setback, the City Council forged ahead, using a combination of state grants and loans combined with municipal park fees paid by developers to finance the project.

Late last year, sandblasting and other restoration work began on the pier’s 340-foot concrete base, a sweeping set of ramps anchoring the structure to the shoreline at Third Street. That work, which will include several coats of paint, is expected to be finished by September, Prentice said.

But workers from Crowley Constructors Inc., a Long Beach marine construction firm, did not begin swarming over the wooden portion of the pier until a couple of weeks ago. Swinging crowbars and hammers, they methodically stripped the railing, planks and lighting fixtures from the old pier, leaving only pilings and thick wooden beams.

On Wednesday, the second phase of the operation began. First a bulldozer graded a roadway on the beach to the foot of the old wooden pier and formed a sandy bed adjacent to the pilings. Then construction crews slowly motored a 110-ton crane onto huge timbers laid on the pad.

Next, a second, smaller crane was driven to the site and hooked by cable to the 100-foot boom of the larger machine. Like a mother hefting her baby, the big crane lifted the 65-ton machine upward and placed it gently on the pier.

Harold DeNike, operations manager for Owl Crane and Rigging, a Compton-based firm acting as a subcontractor for Crowley, said the only real worry was whether the sand might give way under the weight of the cranes.

“This was just a little bit of a touchy job,” DeNike said, kicking at the sand after the operation was completed. “With this type of ground, you never know what’s going to happen. That’s the problem.”

In the days and weeks to come, Prentice said, the squat, white-and-rust-colored little crane will be used to pound rows of Douglas fir pilings into the ocean bottom, each placed midway between the existing pilings. Workers will use hydraulic pressure pipes to help force the pilings down, placing the huge timbers 40 feet below the ocean bottom.

Each piling is surrounded by a tough plastic sleeve along part of its length. Prentice said workers will be careful to pound each timber deep enough so that the sleeve is at about the level of the ocean bottom, helping to keep the shifting sands from eating away at the wood. That phenomenon weakened the old pier, making it vulnerable to the winter storms of 1978 and 1983, he said.

As the pier slowly reaches out to sea, a catwalk will be erected below the deck level, allowing workers to construct the network of cross-beams, stringers and other supports that will give the pier a rigid foundation. Unlike the old wooden supports that would warp and rot, the new pier will have tubular metal beams that should better survive the elements, Prentice said.

After the pilings are laid, probably sometime in December, the crane will be lifted off the new pier’s end by a barge-mounted hoist. Workers then will construct a lifeguard tower and bait shop near the pier’s midpoint as well as a seafood restaurant and snack bar on its square hammerhead.

With a height of about 30 feet above the swells during low tide, the pier will be 5 feet taller than its predecessor.

During the winter, storm waves can reach heights of more than 20 feet, endangering the cross-supports of a lower structure. Using high-tech computer modeling and wave analysis, designers have produced a pier that should withstand the type of winter storm that hits only once every 100 years as well as 100 m.p.h. winds, Prentice said.

Watenpaugh vividly recalls trodding onto the pier with Prentice to inspect the structure one stormy day during the ferocious winter of 1983. As the pier creaked and swayed with the waves, Watenpaugh gazed out to sea and spotted a billowing set of whitecaps bearing down on the battered structure.

The pair scampered for the shoreline as the massive swells approached. As they hurried off, the waves swept beneath the pier, sending spray gushing between the planks.

In addition to being safely above the pounding sea, the new pier will feature timber treated extensively with petroleum-based wood preservatives that will more effectively ward off the effects of water and the advances of the insidious marine bore, an ocean-borne insect that eats wood.

The project has city officials and residents excited, Watenpaugh said. One recent afternoon, he was watching work at the pier when a man approached and asked what was going on.

When Watenpaugh explained about the pier being built, the octogenarian smiled, recalling how he often fished off piers in Oceanside in the nearly six decades that he has lived in the city.

“Hope I live long enough to get to fish off it again,” he said.