Four days after a winter swell took out a 150-foot section of the historic Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf, the mayor of Santa Cruz is hedging when asked about whether a rebuilding plan is getting underway.
“Nobody has made a decision yet,” said Mayor Fred Keeley at a Friday press conference, per Bay Area News Group. “To say we’re simply going to put it back, is much more risky and frankly irresponsible than having a very serious conversation.”
While the 110-year-old pier is a central fixture in Santa Cruz, adjacent to the equally historic Beach Boardwalk and amusement park, Monday’s collapse again calls into question whether public money should continue to be poured into a structure that may increasingly become a liability as climate change churns up stronger winter storms.
Case in point: A $4 million shoring-up project was already underway, and that section of the wharf was already closed to the public due to damage from last winter’s storms, when Monday’s waves came and finished it off.
Three people working on the project, two contractors and a city employee, were on the shaky pier when it collapsed, and could be seen floating on boardwalk boards after it went down. They were all rescued and uninjured.
“You have a mile-long commercial roadway over open ocean,” Mayor Keeley said today, per Bay Area News Group. “Is that the right thing to keep doing, and if so, in what way?”
The city will now likely study what to do with the pier, which has billed itself as the longest all-wooden pier in the world. And now that a different section of it is now at the pier’s end, taking the brunt of incoming swells, will that section be vulnerable to a future storm?
City Manager Matt Huffaker spoke at the news conference, promising that the wharf and its business would reopen soon, however that reopening may still be a few weeks off. The city is undertaking a new structural assessment of the pier, and there’s a complicated process to remove a couple pieces of heavy equipment, a crane and a skid-steer, that had been sitting on the part of the wharf that collapsed, and are now in the water threatening to bump against the still-standing parts of the pier structure.
As far back as 2011, when that tsunami from Japan caused $5 million in damage to Santa Cruz’s docks and boats, the city has had a long-range plan to install new fortifications around the wharf, and presumably that project will continue — after resolving a number of lawsuits over the project, as the Chronicle reports. However the future of the whole wharf now looks a bit more uncertain.
Previously: Three Rescued as Piece of Santa Cruz Wharf Falls Into Ocean
Photo: City of Santa Cruz