Time, Elements Take Toll on Southland Piers : 2 Have Been Shut; Repairs on Others Limit Their Use

Ruth Memmen recalls fondly the twice-daily walks with her senior citizen friends down to the Venice pier to savor “the glorious ocean and the gorgeous sunsets.”

“Everyone here truly enjoyed walking on the pier. It was our favorite pastime,” said Memmen, retired and living alone at a senior citizens’ home four blocks from the pier. “It was healthy. It was happy. We had good times just going for walks, 365 days and nights of the year.”

But it hasn’t happened since 1986, when Los Angeles officials, alarmed at reports from engineers, shut the pier and wrapped it in chain link to keep chunks of concrete from falling on beach walkers.

Seeming to be as much a part of beach culture as the sand itself, Southland piers have run into hard times. Some have been crippled by poor maintenance. Many are feeling the effects of age. In the last five years, all have been battered by a concentration of storms more severe than ocean scientists had believed probable.

Two of Southern California’s 22 publicly owned piers--Venice and the one at Huntington Beach--have been closed. In Huntington Beach, $2 million was spent to repair storm damage before officials faced the fact that the structure had to be demolished.

Two other piers are closed for repairs, two are only partly open, and three more are expected to be at least partially closed for repairs within the next year. More than $20 million, exclusive of normal maintenance, has been spent on piers this decade.

Up and Down the Coast

It has not been enough. Officials now hope that $37 million more will repair storm damage and restore the toll taken by the daily ravages of the sea, according to pier owners from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. They have turned to new building materials to strengthen piers, and some hope commercialization of the piers will help pay the bills.

But officials fear that as much as $55 million might be needed to repair and stabilize these icons of California living to which millions--from the oldest to the youngest, the wealthy, the poor, locals and tourists--flock each year, heading for exercise or rest, wanting to eat dinner or to catch it, seeking companionship or solitude.

On a recent weekend at the Manhattan Beach Pier, perched between land and sea, a man who has made a daily ritual of ocean fishing skewered the bait with his hook and cast his line into the sea.

“For some reason, people who are out on the pier have an altogether different attitude about everyone,” said Al, who retired 12 years ago. “Everybody’s nice. I have yet to run into anybody out here I couldn’t take to.”

Nearby, Luz Miller lugged 9-month-old Jordan in a backpack and watched her energetic 2 1/2-year-old son, P. J., cavorting far ahead.

“We come several times a week. I like being over the water,” she said. “Besides, P. J. can only run as far as the end. And that’s it.”

Farther down the beach, two septuagenarians shared a bench, a spectacular view and a quiet conversation on Hermosa pier. Both widows, they met there and have become friends.

“It’s so relaxing to watch the waves,” said Ann Cox. Her companion, Helen Carr, said she comes every day for the “sun, wind and waves.”

“Or now, maybe every other day,” she said with a smile.

Southern California’s 22 public ocean piers are as varied as the motives for visiting them.

The old wooden structure at Ventura started as a working pier over which cattle and lumber moved along railroad tracks and onto coastal steamships.

The scheme of a land developer, the original Manhattan Beach Pier was conceived as a magnet to attract new home buyers, and was completed along with a newfangled machine that converted the power of the waves to electricity to light the pier.

The Imperial Beach Pier near the Mexican border has special meaning for bird watchers: Reconstruction there was halted from May through September out of fear that noisy pile-driving might disturb nearby nesting grounds of the endangered California least tern.

At Huntington Beach, the pilings were carefully designed 30 feet apart so the ever-present surfers can “shoot the pier.”

Over-water bungalows may be rented on the the hybrid Crystal Pier in San Diego, providing an evening’s sleep said to be so restful that the small motel claims to attract repeat customers from Hawaii.

The pier complex at Redondo Beach is an arch intersected twice by straight lines, like some quirky cattleman’s brand burned into the sea. As with the most famous pier on the coast, the one in Santa Monica, it is covered with restaurants and shops.

The Venice Pier is a simple, straight, uncluttered pathway over the ocean. It has been closed, declared a hazard. Officials have set aside $500,000 for its demolition.

The storms that surged out of the Pacific beginning six years ago have changed the way scientists and engineers view the relationship of land and water.

Huge waves, rolling on top of record high tides, savaged the coast and inflicted severe damage to 12 piers. Severe storms have continued to occur since, with waves higher than ever before recorded off Los Angeles last January.

The experts had not thought such storms possible.

“From 1939 to 1979, we have shown there was one major storm in 40 years,” said Richard J. Seymour of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

“It’s very clear that this was a 40-year period of extremely mild conditions along this coast in terms of big waves,” Seymour said. “In this decade so far, we have had 12 major storms, six in 1982-83 alone. That’s a very dramatic change in the weather pattern.”

In addition, the storms in 1983 came on top of higher ocean levels associated with El Nino, according to Robert Wiegel of the University of California at Berkeley. The conditions rendered obsolete wave-prediction techniques developed for amphibious landings during World War II.

Coastal engineers had never assumed that big storms and high ocean levels could coincide. “Here are two generations that never saw a real storm,” Seymour said. “It certainly is no surprise that there has been tremendous damage during the ‘80s.”

After the 1983 storms, “we realized that the high water level occurred during the storm period,” said James R. Walker, engineer for Maffatt & Nichol, a Long Beach engineering firm. An earlier assumption, that high water and severe storms were not linked, had to be jettisoned, Walker said.

In effect, piers had been built too low over the water.

The solution in Imperial Beach, for instance, is a pier 9 feet higher, or 31 1/2 feet above mean water level at the seaward end, when reconstruction is completed. In San Clemente, the last 440 feet have been elevated 3 feet. The end of the Oceanside pier is 3 1/2 feet higher than it was.

“What destroyed this pier,” said Norman Williams, who heads the Imperial Beach Community Development Agency, “was not waves breaking over, but big waves underneath lifting up the deck. We have high hopes that some of these design changes are going to make a difference.”

Experts also believe that wood has become obsolete as piling for piers, at least at the seaward end of longer piers. Calculations based on the force of more powerful waves show that, in deeper water, the traditional 18-inch-diameter wooden pile may not hold.

One answer has come from the Sea of Japan, where polyethylene-coated steel pilings have been developed. They are stronger in deeper water and are expected to last longer than wood or steel-reinforced concrete. The new piers have been used at San Clemente, at Pismo Beach north of Santa Barbara and at Imperial Beach.

But better engineering and materials can do little to counteract poor maintenance, which is what some officials say has inflicted the most damage. Attention to wear and tear on cross braces, pilings and the pier deck--sometimes calling for replacement of worn-out parts or recoating surfaces--is routine but important, they say.

The state Department of Parks and Recreation owns four piers, including the one in Ventura, and at least three need major overhauls.

“After the 1983 storms, we basically applied a Band-Aid,” said parks engineer David Hammond. “We spent less than $200,000 (at Ventura) and you’re talking about something that needs a million dollars worth of work to bring it up to snuff. The state doesn’t have those kinds of funds.”

Venice Pier was maintained by Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors until 1986, when the county got out of the business.

“I don’t know whether you can say maintenance was bad, or inspection was poor,” said Al Rutsch, assistant executive officer of the state Wildlife Conservation Board, a major source of funding for piers.

In Huntington Beach, officials spent $2 million to rebuild the end of the pier lost in 1983, saw it lost again in 1988, and then discovered last July that the structure had deteriorated beyond repair.

“The smart thing in hindsight, would have been to just go ahead and start the program to reconstruct the pier (in 1983),” said city administrator Paul Cook. The city had been warned as early as 1979 that the pier was in “bad shape,” Cook said, but officials opted for the ill-fated repairs rather than reconstruction.

One of the newest piers on the coast, Aliso, built in the early 1970s, is closed for extensive rebuilding. “To date, there really has been no maintenance on it,” said Greg Derr of the Orange County Department of Harbors, Beaches and Parks. “They had repaired the lights, but had not cleaned the piles. There was no structural maintenance done.”

Some Just Too Old

Some piers are “simply very old and at the end of their useful life,” said Mark Beyeler, an official of the California Coastal Conservancy, a state agency involved in coastal recreational and conservation planning. Maintenance aside, some of them should not be standing, he said.

“Now, it’s not a matter of putting $100,000 (in repairs). You’ve got to put $2,500,000 in or they’re not going to stand,” Beyeler said.

Beyeler estimated that as much as $25 million for pier work along the Southland coast might be needed within the next two years.

“We are in a funding crisis. We don’t have enough money in state government, and there isn’t enough money in the localities to make the necessary repairs. Which means we have to find some money in special places.”

On Oct. 15, Santa Barbara threw a birthday party for 116-year-old Stearns Wharf.

The 2,300-foot pier attracts 2 million visitors a year. Revenues from the four restaurants and 15 shops generated $1.2 million last year, more than enough to fund a $350,000 maintenance budget.

Wharf managers are installing a sophisticated, $100,000 experimental firefighting system. Planners are thinking about a 950-foot extension. The pier generates enough revenue to insure itself, on a coast where insurance at any price is a rarity.

“It’s a focal point of the city,” said waterfront director Rich Bouma. “It’s still people-oriented.”

Ten years ago, the pier was shut down, and falling down. But the city saw the potential and invested $5 million for a face lift, drawing in part on funds it received as compensation for damage from oil spills.

The structure reopened in 1981 and has at least broken even every year since, Bouma said.

Commercial expansion is also considered the key to the ambitious $30-million rebuilding and remodeling of the 1912 Santa Monica Pier. A nonprofit firm running the project is now negotiating with businesses who want a piece of the 150,000 square feet of space planned, more than doubling the present size. Included in the price tag is $9 million for repair of lingering structural damage from the winter storms of 1982-83.

In Redondo Beach, the remaining portions of the intricate pier complex are covered with restaurants, shops and other ventures. Businesses pay between 3% and 7% of gross revenues, enough to pay for pier bills in a normal year, according to Sheila Schoettger, harbor director.

“When you shake it all out, it’s a business,” Schoettger said. “It’s a pleasant sort of business, providing the public with recreational and social opportunities that others cannot.”

That vision of financial self-sufficiency inspired the state parks department last March to give a local entrepreneur a 20-year lease of Malibu pier. The state expected businesses to sprout in two empty buildings on the seaward end and to receive a cut of the profits for repair and maintenance. All the lessee, Joel Ladin, had to do was come up the $400,000 needed to stabilize the pier.

Nine months later, Ladin backed out, effective Nov. 1.

“The rub,” according to Bud Getty, a state parks official, was the repair cost. Instead of $400,000, Ladin said his engineers reported the price would be more like $4 million.

There also is a rub at Stearns Wharf. Although its relatively recent commercialization is widely recognized as a success story, many municipal operators along the coast simply don’t want to follow suit, preferring the pristine experience of an uncluttered pier.

In Huntington Beach, Cook says sentiment is for “as little as possible,” probably a simple rebuilding of the lone cafe that again went down with the end of the pier this year.

The pier-building fund in Manhattan Beach is about $300,000 short, but there is no apparent sentiment for anything other than restoration of the existing structure, including a snack shop and a small teaching station for schoolchildren.

“The pier is really the only remaining sign of the past, the souvenir of the pride of the founders of the city,” said Keith Robinson, local cartoonist, author and head of a group supporting pier restoration.

“It’s an important symbol of what makes Manhattan Beach a separate community from other Los Angeles suburbs,” Robinson said.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA’S CRUMBLING PIERS

Here is the status of public piers from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border:

1. STEARNS WHARF: 116-year-old pier closed for brief periods after storms and fire this decade; rebuilt after years of closure in 1981 for $5 million. Annual maintenance budget of $350,000, among highest of Southern California piers. Lease payments by 19 businesses make pier virtually self-sufficient.

Owner: City of Santa Barbara.

2. VENTURA PIER: Partly reopened in July after two-year closure resulting from storm damage; last 400 feet of 1,600-foot wooden pier closed. Minimal repairs made this decade. State and city conducting engineering study.

Projected cost: $2.5 million to $5 million

Owner: State of California

3. PORT HUENEME PIER: Survived storms intact; landward 500 feet of 1,300-foot pier deteriorated, repair considered.

Projected cost: $600,000

Owner: City of Hueneme

4. MALIBU PIER: Now open; storms of 1982-83 required closure and extensive repair. End of pier requires stabilization; deal to generate repair funds through 20-year lease abrogated Nov. 1 by concessionaire who claims repair costs prohibitive.

Projected cost: Estimates range from $400,000 to $2 million.

Owner: State of California

5. SANTA MONICA PIER: The coast’s most famous pier is in the midst of an ambitious $30-million repair and renovation project that by 1991 will more than double commercial development. Damage from the 1982-83 storms is being repaired at a cost of $9 million, including restoration of the 400-foot end of the municipal pier due to start this month.

Costs: repair and development, $30 million ($12 million from developers/tenants)

Owner: City of Santa Monica

6. VENICE PIER: Closed in 1987 after engineers declared it unsafe, city set aside $500,000 for demolition. New study under way examining whether repair possible.

Projected cost of replacement: $5.5 million

Owner: City of Los Angeles

7. MANHATTAN BEACH PIER: The 68-year-old pier weathered the storms of the decade but natural decay requires extensive repair. Open to foot traffic, but service vehicles recently banned. A piece of concrete falling from the pier in 1984 hit and crippled a jogger; underside of pier now wrapped in chain-link fence. City Council voted Nov. 1 to seek cash for repair.

Projected cost: $2,590,000 (replacement cost $4,870,000)

Owner: State of California

8. HERMOSA BEACH PIER: Open. Minor damage from January storms; estimated repair $150,000.

Owner: City of Hermosa Beach

9. REDONDO PIERS: Storms and fire ravaged the complex of three municipal piers that draw up to 6 million visitors a year, making it the most visited in Southern California. January storm caused $500,000 in damage, April storm another $500,000, May fire $2.4 million and later storm $500,000. Northern end of horseshoe pier closed, but restaurants and shops at southern end and adjacent Monstadt pier open.

Projected cost: At least $4 million; City Council in November ordered design work begun.

Owner: City of Redondo Beach

10. CABRILLO PIER: Resting on a breakwater, the pier lost a parking lot at its base in winter storms; reconstruction due to start shortly.

Projected cost: $250,000

Owner: City of Los Angeles

11. BELMONT PIER: Sheltered by a breakwater, the 600-foot pier weathered the decade with minimal damage.

Owner: City of Long Beach

12. SEAL BEACH PIER: Pier reopened 1985 after midsection was destroyed in winter storms, 1982-83; repair cost was $2 million.

Owner: City of Seal Beach

13. HUNTINGTON BEACH PIER: Closed July after engineers declared the pier unsound. Underside fenced to keep concrete from falling. Lost end of 1,830-foot pier and restaurant in 1982-83 storms; rebuilt for $2 million and lost again in January, 1988 storms. Construction schedule: uncertain.

Projected cost: $10 million for demolition and replacement.

Owner: City of Huntington Beach

14. BALBOA and NEWPORT PIERS: No major damage to either since 1939; city officials attribute good record to continuous maintenance, sheltering by Channel Islands and relatively deep water at end of piers that dissipates destructive force of waves.

Owner: City of Newport Beach

15. ALISO PIER: Closed entirely for repair of damage from storms and normal wear, although newest pier on Southern California coast, built in 1972. Most of 620-foot pier closed since 1986; expected to reopen in April.

Projected cost: $1,081,000

Owner: Orange County

16. DANA HARBOR PIER: Opened last month after complete restoration at cost of over $160,000; sits in harbor now protected by a breakwater.

Owner: Orange County

17. SAN CLEMENTE PIER: Reopened after the seaward 400 feet, lost in 1982-83 winter storms, was replaced and remainder of pier repaired at cost of $1.4 million.

Owner: City of San Clemente

18. OCEANSIDE PIER: Reopened in September after four years of rebuilding at cost of $5.5 million; restored to original length of 1,942 feet. Weakened by age, lost all but 300 feet to storms by 1983.

Owner: City of Oceanside.

19. CRYSTAL PIER: Reconstruction completed earlier this year for $710,000 on 400-foot end of pier lost in 1982-83 winter storms. Pier now 800 feet long.

Owner: Willis Allen to mean high tide line,seaward by City of San Diego.

20. OCEAN BEACH PIER: Deteriorated as a result of age, design work for repair now under way. Pier open, to be closed for periods during year-long construction.

Projected cost: $1.5 million

Owner: City of San Diego.

21. IMPERIAL BEACH PIER: Closed for rebuilding after more than 500 feet of 1,200-foot pier went down in 1982-83 winter storms. Construction should be complete in January; pier will have a unique spade-shaped end.

Cost: $2.7 million

Owner: City of Imperial Beach.

* The Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier in La Jolla, dedicated this year at a cost $3.95 million, replaced an earlier version that could not be repaired after storm damage, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The 1,090-foot-long pier is owned by the regents of the University of California and is not open to the public.

Paradise Cove and pier in Malibu is privately owned, but open to the public. Parking is by fee. Some 400 feet of original 600-foot-long pier was lost in 1982-83 storms, and will not be rebuilt because of cost, according to a spokesman for the owner, Paradise Cove Land Co.