Encinitas Abandons Stairs, but Breathes No Easier

With a wary eye on the upcoming winter surfing season, the city of Encinitas has permanently closed an ailing, 35-year-old stairway to Swami’s Beach--one of the county’s most popular surfing spots.

Meanwhile, in the face of a seasonal onslaught that brings hundreds of surfers to the rocky North County shores, city officials are trying to figure out what to do until a new stairway can be completed late next year.

“It’s a real dilemma,” said Dave Wigginton, Encinitas community services director. “We get hundreds of surfers here this time of year. And we don’t want anyone to get hurt. Just how to accomplish that, we don’t know.”

The city’s problem is that many beach users have ignored the posted warning signs and scaled the barricade to use the stairs. Others have used a dangerous, winding path down the jagged cliffs to reach the water, rather than taking other routes advised by the city.

Several surfers said they have fallen on the path with their heavy boards, and Wigginton fears that, if someone is injured on the stairs or path, the city might be sued.

Since the early 1950s, the wooden and iron stairway has eased beach-goers’ descents down a rugged cliffside to some of the most awesome white-water breaks in the world. The beach, which features the best waves during the winter season, has been featured in many surfing movies and was even mentioned in the Beach Boys’ ode to the sport, “Surfin’ USA.”

The city closed the aging stairway in August after a contractor hired to repair the structure told them it was a public danger because of several rotted beams and other foundation problems.

Recently, city officials were told that it would cost as much to repair the stairway as it will to construct the new one, and this week decided against salvaging the original. The new access, to be built about 50 feet north of the old steps, will have a price tag of about $460,000.

“After months of uncertainty, we’re sure now that the stairs are unrepairable,” Wigginton said. “We’re just going to have to leave them posted as a danger until we can come up with a solution.”

The city’s alternatives include taking the bridge down altogether, closing the whole parking area to traffic or hiring daytime guards to make sure people don’t try to scale the stairs or the path.

Lifeguards visit the site occasionally to warn onlookers of the danger of using the stairs. But they have no enforcement powers such as writing tickets, city officials said.

“Another alternative is to leave the stairs as they are with the posted signs and assume that citizens will be mature enough to take a different access to the beach,” Wigginton said.

The two nearest beach accesses are a mile to the north and south of Swami’s Beach, he said.

Wigginton gave a copy of the engineer’s report to the Swami’s Surf Club, a group of 80 surfers who use the beach year-round, in the hopes that it can help devise a solution. That includes getting the word out to surfers to use other ways to get to the beach, he said.

Construction on the new stairway will begin 60 to 90 days after the city receives approval by the state Coastal Commission for the project.