Navy Plans Pier for Island

Its ships thrashed by wild weather and hindered by thousands of seals and sea lions, the Navy wants to build a $13.7-million pier on remote San Nicolas Island.

Navy barges now land--when they can--on a beach on the south end of the island. But the sandy shore teems in the winter with seals and sea lions that sometimes slip around barriers, crowd over each other and make a difficult, windy landing even more of a challenge.

Pushed up from the sea floor thousands of years ago, the island is a flat, wind-swept rock about 60 miles offshore, half an hour away by plane but 10 hours by ship from Point Mugu. The island is owned by the Navy and is one of the eight Channel Islands--five of which are protected as a national park.

San Nicolas is a central component of the Navy’s missile testing system and home to about 225 personnel, but landing a barge full of bulky equipment can be difficult.

The barge can rock violently in the wintry sea. For several months during the winter, landing is almost impossible, and the barge sometimes must turn around.

“It’s a risky operation,” said Cmdr. Scott Sasscer, the officer in charge of San Nicolas. “It’s just unsafe.”

The barge makes 24 to 40 trips a year to the island, bringing testing equipment and the necessities of everyday life, but it loses 30% to 40% of its landing opportunities because of rough weather.

“Going out to the island, we may not know if we can land or not,” Sasscer said. On one trip in rough weather, for instance, a cable used to hold the barge at shore snapped.

Sasscer said the landing problems double the Navy’s shipping costs.

“We’re not just paying for the barge,” he said. “We’re paying for construction delays. Sometimes supplies don’t hit the beach for weeks.”

Isle Hosts the Mating Game

The Navy is proposing a 166-by-35-yard pier at one of two spots on the south end of the island, along with two new buildings and a parking area.

The funding has been appropriated in President Bush’s budget, and its next stop is the floor of the House. Even if approved by Congress, the plan still would require environmental study and approvals by a number of local agencies.

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who said he has been working on getting the funding for three or four years, said, “It’s very clear Navy operations are significantly impaired by the weather. A good portion of the year they can’t operate out there.”

The population of elephant seals and California sea lions along the south end of San Nicolas during the mating season is a result of tougher conservation laws. Rarely found on the south end of the island in 1980s, now as many as 25,000 California sea lions and 15,000 elephant seals arrive here during the winter to mate. That number is second only to San Miguel Island.

“You could walk down the beach and never touch the sand,” said Tony Parisi of the Naval Air Weapons Command.

Although residents of the California islands for more than 1,000 years, elephant seals were thought to be extinct a century ago, hunted for their blubber and oil. But with legal protections, their numbers are bouncing back, said Brent Stewart, a marine mammal expert at Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute in San Diego.

Adult males can grow to 5,000 pounds. During the breeding season, which begins in December, they are particularly aggressive, crashing against each other in shallow water and on land. For the most part, the seals, sea lions and the Navy don’t seem to interfere with each other. The Navy’s missile testing work occurs in the interior of the island. The barge landings are, for the most part, the only time the Navy and the animals cross paths.

But the pier plan “would be a good idea,” said Paul Collins, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. “It also limits the impact on snowy plovers,” an endangered species that nests in a closed-off beach area on the island.

Three years ago, the Navy set up an onshore landing, a big metal platform on the beach topped by bars similar to those in a cattle chute. But seals still slip around the bars and onto the so-called pontoon. Even the mammoth elephant seals have been known to cross the fence.

“A bull elephant seal being chased by another bull elephant seal can get over,” said Grace Smith, a biologist for the Navy. “It’s a unique problem.”

After the mating season, some of the animals come back to molt at various stages throughout the year.

During the spring, a band of male seal lions that have been unable to find mates clusters along the shore. The rest of the time, the seals and sea lions spend their time at sea, with some ranging as far as the Pacific Northwest.

Keeping Animals Off Equipment a Task

Though seals prefer the sand, the beach-side roads are lined with barriers and stamped with a warning for drivers to look out for crossing marine mammals.

“They get on the road. They wander up from the beaches,” Smith said. “I don’t think there’s another situation where you’d have to watch for seals crossing the road.”

Smith and co-worker Steve Schwartz are responsible for convincing the lumbering behemoths to move. They have learned that loud noises don’t work. Patience does. “They’ll get nervous and move off,” Schwartz said.

“We have to protect people as well as marine mammals,” Smith said. “You get in the way of a 5,000-pound elephant seal and it’s going to do some damage.”