Rebuild Pier With Steel, Officials Urge

In rebuilding its most battered landmark, Ventura may have to choose strength over length and surrender its distinction as having the state’s longest wooden pier, a city official said Tuesday.

After poring over a 198-page engineering feasibility study, city planners and engineers recommended the city use its $2.4-million insurance settlement to reinforce the existing pier with steel bracing, and rebuild 160 feet of the missing pier with steel, rather than wooden piles. They also recommended elevating the height of the extension’s deck to further protect it against crashing waves.

The reconstruction would reduce the formerly 1,958-foot wooden pier to 1,693 feet, making it too short for a record.

“People would like to have a pier that would stay there,” said J. Henry Graumlich, assistant to the Ventura public works director. “This would give us the most bang for the buck. If we rebuild with wooden piles it is simply a matter of time before a storm would take it [the pier] out again.”

On Thursday, a public hearing on the staff’s rebuilding recommendations will be held by the Community Affairs Commission, which will ultimately make a formal recommendation to the City Council. The 7 p.m. hearing will be held in City Council chambers at City Hall, 501 Poli St.

Devlin Raley, commission chairman, emphasized that it is premature to come to any conclusions based on the staff recommendations. It is the public that must decide what it wants, he said.

“We have done a lot of homework,” said Raley. “And on Thursday we will have the luxury of having a formal hearing, where people can bring their feelings and thoughts to the decision-making process.”

The Ventura Pier has long stirred public passion, and served as an emotional lightening rod for Ventura citizens who care about the town’s history. The 124-year-old pier, which juts out into the pounding Pacific surf, affords spectacular views of the Ventura hills, and postcard-perfect California sunsets. Long touted as the longest wooden pier in California, if not along the entire West Coast, pier supporters have fought fiercely to maintain their proud landmark.

But after 425 feet of the newly rebuilt wooden pier disappeared into the sea in December 1995, people began to wonder if rebuilding the pier with wood was a futile exercise. And the latest feasibility study shows that the El Nino phenomenon has made big winter waves even bigger since 1990.

And some suggest that Ventura’s claim of having the longest wooden pier is a dubious one, anyway.

“It wasn’t concluded that we were the longest wooden pier,” said City Engineer Rick Raives. “Whether we were or not has affected some decisions in the past. But it wasn’t a state recognized historical landmark.”

Graumlich, the public works assistant, said the pier was only the state’s longest all-wooden one “when storms took out some of the other contenders.”

A review of a California wooden pier survey taken at the end of 1995 shows that since 1914, Santa Cruz has had the longest wooden pier in the state, depriving Ventura of its treasured title. But what counts as a wooden pier?

Though the 2,745-foot Santa Cruz pier has wooden piles, it is topped by an asphalt parking lot. Ventura, on the other hand--if the city’s recommendations prevail--will remain aesthetically faithful to the original design with a deck of wooden planks but have steel piles below.

Some of the city’s longtime pier supporters say that all they care about is that the pier is one day restored to its original length. The material used is not the issue.

“I would like to see the pier at its full length of 1,958 feet,” said Ventura resident Edna Mills, who after purchasing wooden planks in support of the pier restoration campaign salvaged her family’s planks from the flotsam washed ashore in last winter’s storm.

“I don’t really care what the underpinnings are made of.”