Bulldozing Avila Beach to Save It

There are no sandy feet running along the sidewalks, no barking dogs on the beach, no more boisterous fishermen rolling carts out to the pier each morning.

The familiar sounds of summer in this San Luis Obispo County beach town have been replaced this season by the rumble of giant cranes and of trucks hauling away sand contaminated with oil. Familiar haunts, such as the Jetty restaurant and Beachcomber Bill’s, are being leveled by bulldozers.

Locals bemoan a lost summer as they witness the unprecedented destruction and excavation of downtown Avila Beach by oil giant Unocal, which is cleaning up one of the biggest environmental disasters in California history, caused by leaking pipes that contaminated the soil beneath the town.

“Nobody was considering what excavation really meant,” said Micheal Kidd, co-owner of the Avila Beach Inn, the only business still operating on Front Street. “A lot of people said, ‘Let’s punish Unocal.’ But they didn’t realize they’d be punishing themselves.”

He said the inn still fills up on weekends, but the majority of the 32 rooms sit empty during the week. Like most business owners, Kidd received a settlement from Unocal to cover lost income this year, but he wonders what will become of Avila Beach once the demolition is finished and the work crews clear out, leaving downtown in ruins.

Summer is usually the busy season in Avila Beach, with the fog burning off by midmorning most days and the bay sheltered from the wind. There are only 450 permanent residents, but 10,000 visitors from as far away as Bakersfield and Fresno stop by on a typical summer weekend.

Avila Beach is pressed between the rolling Irish Hills and the Pacific Ocean, just south of San Luis Obispo. There is only one road in, and it also serves nearby Port San Luis and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

In the early part of the century, Avila Beach was a major oil port and shipped Santa Maria crude to destinations around the world. The port also was used to offload diesel fuel and gasoline.

In recent months, Unocal crews have been removing pollution from beneath the town’s business district. The area was contaminated over many years by leaking pipelines that ran from an old tank farm under downtown Avila Beach to the Unocal oil pier.

The extent of the problem was discovered in 1989. County, state and oil company officials battled for 10 years before Unocal agreed to pay damages and excavate the town.

The work is costing Unocal at least $16.5 million, but oil company officials decline to disclose specifics involved in buying out and settling with property owners. The few remaining area businesses have been dramatically affected by the demolition and negative publicity.

The impact also is being felt in Port San Luis, a community about a mile from Avila Beach with its own beaches and pier, and free from contamination.

“We’re not on the way anywhere else,” said B.J. Johnson, who owns a live fish operation at the port. “If people hear Avila is closed down, they don’t come. That’s a few thousand people who won’t be running out here to buy oysters or crab to barbecue on the beach.”

The cleanup began in November and the downtown work started in spring. Unocal officials expect to finish by next summer.

There has been extensive debate on how to rebuild downtown Avila Beach, an assortment of mom-and-pop shops, eateries and old stucco apartments. Most of the buildings are being torn down. Only the yacht club and grocery store were deemed to have enough historical significance to be preserved. Those structures are being carted away and will be returned once the work is finished.

“We just want to keep it kind of low-key, like it was,” said Evelyn Phelan, an 89-year-old motel owner. “There’s no room for high-rises here. We just want to keep it kind of funky.”

Funky has an intangible value that county officials also want to retain. San Luis Obispo County Supervisor Peg Pinard said the town desperately wants to avoid the beige-and-red-tile sameness of communities like Santa Barbara.

“It’s OK to have tin roofs,” Pinard said. “It’s OK to have just about anything that is designed in a way that is unique.”

Unocal spokesman Barry Lane said the company plans to sell off the property it has acquired as soon as the land is clean, and will play no role in the future look of the town.

“What Avila becomes is what the community wants it to become,” Lane said.

Sylvia Miksch, 84, looked down on the construction one recent morning from her second-floor apartment on 1st Street. She’s so close that Unocal will put her up in a Shell Beach motel when it gets too noisy.

“They are going to pay for everything,” Miksch said. “They are even paying for the food. It will be like having a vacation.”

She said she has had to buy groceries outside of town and limit where she takes her daily one- or two-mile walks, but she has no plans to move. Miksch and her late husband retired to Avila Beach after traveling with the Navy.

“We traveled all over the world, and we finally found Avila Beach,” said. “This was the place we wanted. It was just perfect before all this started.”

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Lost Summer

Avila Beach is now paying the price of having been an oil port for most of the century. Unocal is tearing down and digging up the entire downtown and beach because of oil contamination.