Spring Revelry Gets an Early Start This Year

Snack stand owner Jack Clapp spent much of Monday with a roller-brush and paint tray, blotting out the graffiti scrawled on his building over the weekend when a spring-break beach crowd got out of control.

“I usually don’t have much of a problem down here,” Clapp said, slathering a coat of peach-colored paint on the concrete building just south of the Huntington Beach Pier, “but I heard that a bunch of people went wild here the other night. They were yelling, screaming and playing loud music. It was bedlam.”

Huntington Beach city lifeguards said that on Saturday night, about 1,000 rowdy youths set off a near-riot, hurling bottles and cans at passers-by, chasing people with burning logs and baseball bats. Authorities were forced to close a parking lot near Lake Street and Pacific Coast Highway early.

No one was injured or arrested, but officials at several Orange County beaches said the incident shows that the youthful revelry associated with spring break--traditionally the week of school vacation before Easter Sunday--is beginning earlier each year.

“We’re not having an Easter week, we’re having an Easter month,” said Jim Turner, a Newport Beach marine safety officer.

Huntington Beach parking lot supervisor Chris Rey said it could just be spring fever.

“I don’t know if it’s a physiological thing or what,” Rey said. “It’s just that time of year when the kids’ hormones are hopping and they react before they think. They get really geared up to be--not so much violent, but rowdy, because they’re excited and want something to happen.”

Last Saturday, Rey said, lifeguards encountered groups of up to 20 youths wielding baseball bats and pacing along a pedestrian path at the beach. They were “just walking and waiting to see if anyone was going to say something so it would start a brawl. It’s that macho thing,” he said. Later, lifeguards received reports that the group was chasing smaller groups with bats and burning logs taken from bonfires.

Lifeguards also stopped a San Francisco woman who was driving at 30 m.p.h. along the path, which is off-limits to all except city-authorized vehicles.

“At first we thought this woman was drunk,” Rey said, “but it turned out that she and her girlfriends were in the car and didn’t know where they were going or what they were doing. They were just revved up and lost their senses.”

Just two lifeguards were on duty last Saturday to deal with the surly crowd, said Steve Seim, a Huntington Beach marine safety officer. Seim added that police called to the scene said they, too, were overburdened, as the department is on off-season shifts.

Turner said that during the week of April 7, the Newport Beach lifeguard force will be staffed at about half of its summertime peak of 65 employees. Six full-time lifeguards, along with a few reserve extras for weekends, were scheduled for March.