Pacifica Pier News

The perch are biting at the Pacifica Pier, but that is small comfort to anglers left on shore when the City Council abruptly closed the popular fishing spot because of concerns about its safety.

”It’s been gorgeous out here for the two weeks we’ve been closed,” moaned Joe Jimno, who has seen the business at his snack bar and bait shop at the front of the pier drop to nothing since the gates were locked January 25. ”We’ve been seeing big perch, three to four pounds, and there’s no one to catch them.”

The decision to shut down the pier came as a surprise, said Pacifica City Manager Daniel Pincetich. City officials had gone to the council to describe storm damage to the pier’s steel bulkhead and to ask for $ 7,000 to put together a repair plan.

But the council, worried that the pier might collapse and injure someone, ordered it closed immediately.

The council probably was being more cautious than it needed to be, Pincetich said.

”We might have gotten them too concerned,” he admitted. ”We’re not worried that the pier is going to collapse, but that it might buckle two inches.

”If it fails, it won’t be with a quick kaboom, but with a slow creak and groan.”

CLOSURE MAY BE RECONSIDERED

The council may consider reopening the pier this week after reviewing a report saying the main danger ”will not be a catastrophic failure but a gradual . . . settlement.”

Such a settlement would ”result in significant damage from an economic point of view, but will not pose a serious threat to life and safety,” the report said.

It would be safe to reopen the pier, the report added, if it is constantly monitored and shut down during bad weather.

The pier’s reopening cannot come soon enough for Jimno, who has run the concessions there for more than 12 years.

”There are about 20 to 30 fishermen a day during the winter, but during the summer we can get as many as 4,000 when the salmon are running,” he said. ”There are also a lot of old guys who come out here every day to walk, talk and watch the fishing. They’ve got no place to go right now.”

The spot is especially popular with the elderly because state law does not require a license for fishing from a pier.

PROBLEMS NEED FIXING

Even if the 18-year-old concrete pier is reopened, there are plenty of problems that need to be fixed if it is going to stay in use for very long, city officials said.

The quarter-mile-long pier, which stands 35 feet above the crashing surf, originally was built as part of the city’s sewer treatment system. A 28-inch pipe from the sewer plant runs beneath the pier’s deck and disappears underwater at its end, where it continues for another quarter-mile offshore. Treated wastewater is pumped through the pipe and into the ocean.

The pier shows the effect of nearly two decades of constant pounding by the waves, said Scott Holmes, Pacifica’s environmental services manager.

Standing on the city’s wide shoreline promenade, Holmes pointed out the rust-covered steel bulkhead that anchors the pier at the shore. Although wet sand was piled high against the weathered structure, it was a different story last month, when storms sucked as much as 15 feet of sand from the beach, he said.

”Six feet under the sand, there are holes in the bulkhead 70 inches long and a foot wide,” he said. ”The waves got in there and began scouring out the hard-packed sand and concrete inside.”

Without that internal support, the end of the pier could start to sag, Holmes said, twisting the wastewater pipe and causing the deck to crack and buckle. To fix the problem, the city will have to sink new pilings into the sand and build a new bulkhead outside the present one.

PIER TAKES BRUNT OF STORMS

The Pacifica Pier always will be vulnerable because of where it is built, Holmes said. It is one of the few piers on the Pacific coast that faces directly west and takes the full brunt of any storm.

”It’s almost like when they built this thing they said ‘In your face, Mother Nature,’ and now Mother Nature is responding,” he said. ”If it was made out of wood, it would have been gone long ago.”

Fixing the bulkhead and even shoring up the concrete legs that carry the pier through the surf are not permanent solutions. The continual battering of the wind and the waves ultimately takes its toll on anything built on Northern California’s rough shoreline.

”Someday, the ocean is going to say, ‘I want it down,’ and then it’s going to be a matter of whether we have enough money to keep it up,” Holmes said.

Copyright 1993 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
The San Francisco Chronicle
FEBRUARY 15, 1993, MONDAY, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A17

LENGTH: 757 words

HEADLINE: Pacifica Shuts Down Pier — Safety Fear
Although popular fishing spot may reopen, it has plenty

BYLINE: John Wildermuth, Chronicle Peninsula Bureau

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