Newly Rebuilt Avila Beach Faces an Identity Crisis

As sailboats bob on the offshore swells like polite old men, a TV news crew from Bakersfield zooms in on a bulldozer working along the beach.

Summer has come to the Central Valley and when the temperature rises, folks in Bakersfield, like everyone else, head for the beach. This happens to be their favorite, so the camera crew is here to let the sunbaked thousands know their Shangri-La is almost ready.

“Come out here and spend your money so we can pay for this town,” jokes a security guard watching the scene.

That will take a while. But here in Love Canal West, the place where, in an echo of Vietnam War logic, they destroyed the town to save it, life will soon be getting back to normal.

Since a huge pool of oil was discovered under the town a decade ago, 200,000 tons of contaminated soil have been dug up and trucked away.

Forty-six houses and commercial buildings have been razed, decimating the heart of the little beach village. Unocal, whose leaking pipelines were the source of the contamination, has repaved Front Street, black and shiny as onyx. The oil company has built a new beach walk with inlaid seashells. Even Florence Martin’s favorite rosebushes have been saved and replanted in front of the post office.

One of the biggest environmental cleanups in state history is moving so swiftly now that locals are deep into planning a big September party celebrating the reopening of this quirky little burg of stucco and clapboard perched on a hill overlooking the Pacific. Unocal is paying for everything, although company officials still don’t know if they’ll be welcome to share in the burgers and baked beans.

“This has been the most interesting project,” said Richard Walloch, Unocal’s project manager at Avila Beach. “I’ve never put a town back together before.”

So far as anyone can tell, no one has ever done what they’re trying to pull off here. A few communities have been devastated by environmental mishaps. Besides Love Canal, there was Times Beach, Mo. But, as far as Walloch can tell, no one has taken a town apart, cleaned the place up and then tried to reassemble it the way it was before.

Some in town believe that when the bulldozers pull out, the stores will come back and Front Street will once again bustle with people from Bakersfield and elsewhere, their feet shod in flip-flops from the new Sea Barn, their stomachs full of chips and soda from the restored grocery. “It will be bigger and better than ever,” enthused Maridel Salisbury, a resident.

Others are just as sure Avila Beach can never be the same.

Only 2 Buildings Will Be Returned

Avila was never much of a metropolis. At its peak, about 400 people lived in the dozen square blocks on the hill above the beach. The downtown area was about four square blocks of restaurants, sundries shops and an old grocery store.

Of the buildings that had to be removed, only two are being returned--the grocery store and the Yacht Club. The destruction of the community has received most of the attention here, but another side of the story was playing out on a recent day in the dusty basement of the post office building.

A group of people, some in sandals and T-shirts, were sitting around cheap folding tables, trying to figure out what to do with $3 million. Unocal gave the money to the community as part of the settlement of claims against the company arising out of the contamination.

The people sitting around the tables were members of the Avila Beach Community Foundation, and it is their task to figure out what projects are worthy of Unocal’s involuntary generosity. One man wanted to put the power lines underground so they won’t ruin his view. A woman wanted to build a laundermat.

If they divided the money up, they could cut $15,000 checks for every one of the 200 or so men, women and children left in town. They are the residents who didn’t pick up and leave after the contamination was uncovered.

These two images, one of devastation, the other of the results of a financial windfall, are part of the mathematics of the Unocal settlement. The environmental and personal cost to the people of the unincorporated community of Avila Beach were beyond computing, yet they had to be computed. So like the photographer punched by a rich athlete, Avila’s travails have been converted into dollars and cents.

Unocal has not revealed the full details of the settlement. But attorney Ed Masry, who represented 80 residents in lawsuits against Unocal, said the total cost of the cleanup and the settlements with state agencies and residents and businesspeople amounted to “well over $100 million.”

Salisbury said she knows of renters who came to town, stayed two months and collected $10,000 in moving costs from Unocal.

But if some people made off with a few bucks, that hardly compares to the years of struggle it took to get the settlement, and the inconvenience that residents have been through while their downtown was destroyed.

“This community was raped,” said Tom Guernsey, a member of the Avila Beach Community Foundation. “A company made billions of dollars using the community, and due to negligence we were sitting on a huge pool of oil.”

Town Had Vital Role During World War II

The story of the rise and fall of Avila Beach is the story of the rise and fall of Central Coast oil. The stuff was so plentiful that locally extracted asphalt was used to fuel gas lamps and pave streets in the 19th century. By 1914, Port San Luis, just up the beach from Avila, became the largest crude oil shipping point in the world.

In World War II, Avila Beach was such a vital cog in the war machine that then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower sent a telegram commending the workers’ hard work in keeping the Pacific fleet supplied with oil.

As industry boomed, Avila Beach became a typical company town. Houses spread across the low hills in a haphazard, unplanned way. They were working folks’ homes--squat, rambling, with rooms sprouting from unlikely places.

But if it had few pretensions, the town had plenty of other things going for it. Located in a sheltered bay, the beach was spared the scarring winds that scraped other beaches bald. Avila was known as the best swimming and sunbathing beach in San Luis Obispo County.

The son of a town doctor, Guernsey has spent most of his life here. Growing up was “a very special experience,” he said. “I remember when you could ride a horse from San Luis Obispo to Avila Beach and never cross a fence.”

Over the years, even as San Luis Obispo grew, Avila remained something of a secret. Until 1989. Mike Rudd, then owner of the Sea Barn, was thinking of opening another business downtown. The soil analysis came back with a surprising result--Rudd had struck oil.

Pipelines Had Leaked for Years

The oil came from pipelines that ran from an old tank farm on the hill above the beach to the Unocal oil pier. The pipes had been leaking for years. But another decade would pass before the environmental disaster that erupted with Rudd’s accidental oil strike finally yielded a settlement.

The state, county and oil company haggled over responsibility and cleanup methods. Unocal proposed injecting bacteria into the ground to break down the toxic waste, but that idea was quickly rejected.

When she was elected in 1997 and found out how long the problem had lingered, county Supervisor Peg Pinard was angry.

“The situation Avila finds itself in is not the same as any other community,” Pinard lectured her colleagues recently. “This is a bomb that dropped on Avila.”

If she was angry, residents were more so. “We had near riots in the early meetings,” she said.

Masry, the Westlake Village lawyer made famous by the movie “Erin Brockovich,” filed suit with two other firms on behalf of residents.

In 1998, Unocal accepted responsibility for the disaster and agreed to excavate the contaminated soil. “There has never been a cleanup project [in California] with the impact on a community this one will have on Avila Beach,” an attorney for the state Fish and Game Department said at the time.

If anything, that proved an understatement.

In the past two years, Unocal has relocated residents, compensated business owners who lost revenue, and bought out those who were fed up and didn’t want to return. Today, Unocal is the largest single property owner in Avila Beach. The company owns 70% of the land downtown.

Unocal officials would like to unload the property, which is why they want to see the town rebuilt as soon as possible.

First, the cleanup must be completed. The company has gone to great lengths to accommodate residents, such as in the case of Florence Martin’s rosebushes. The roses were not only her pride, but a community landmark. When it was decided to raze Martin’s house, Arrie Bachrach dug up the bushes by hand and replanted them in front of the post office.

Said Bachrach, a community liaison with the project’s subcontractor: “I didn’t want to see [the roses] go away.”

Funky, Eclectic Look Favored

If cleaning up Avila was difficult, restoring it to what it was has proved to be a challenge all its own. When county and company officials met with the public on the downtown redesign, they found that the citizens of Avila had very firm ideas of what they wanted their town to be--and not be.

They didn’t want to become a resort. “Too Newport Beach,” was the ultimate condemnation of someone’s plan. What they wanted, they finally said, was what they had. Reduced to two words, that meant funky and eclectic.

That stumped the planners. The problem was, said Walloch, “You’re trying to recreate a hodgepodge that grew up over time.”

In the end, they came as close as they could: no stainless steel, some tile, lots of stucco. “Tidied-up funky,” is how one planner described the style of the new downtown.

When the bulldozers pull out, the pedestrian walk and the sea wall will be finished, along with the new park being donated by Unocal. Most of the beach is open now.

But getting the community back on its feet depends on more than getting the beach ready for the beach blankets and Frisbees. The downtown district will be mostly vacant.

Unocal’s bank account has been supporting the community, but when the company is gone, Avila Beach must stand alone, or fall.

John Euphrat, the principal county planner for the area, is optimistic about Avila’s future. “I expect within five years much of Front Street will be developed,” he said.

But there’s another problem. One of the last things the community did before the contamination was uncovered was to agree to import state water. The $80,000 annual water bill has been paid by Unocal until now.

“That’s a very large bill,” Pinard said. “It’s not fair” to drop that kind of financial burden on residents.

One solution is to allow Avila Beach to build its way out of trouble. Pinard wants to allow more residential units downtown, but the California Coastal Commission has raised concerns about crowding out visitors.

To some in Avila Beach, this confirms their fears of outsiders coming in and changing their community.

“People who have lived here for years are semi-isolationist,” said Guernsey. “They don’t like all the hype of resorts. Now all that is going to change.”

Coastal Commission officials say they’re not trying to change the town. All they want is a guarantee that the beach will be available to all the people of California, not just a few lucky coastal residents.

“The town will never be identical to what it was,” Walloch said.

But then, that’s not necessarily bad. Back at the community foundation meeting, a silver-haired man who seemed comically out of place in his blue suit among the T-shirts and sandals got up to address the foundation members.

If they invested that $3 million with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, he said, their goal of earning 12% annually would be “very achievable.” They could fund all the civic improvements they wanted, using only the interest.

Big smiles broke out around the room. You’re hired, they said.

Better than ever.

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Making a Return

Avila Beach has paid the price for being an oil port for most of the 20th century. Unocal is completing the tearing down and digging up of downtow n and much of the beach area to clean up oil contamination.