Posted on August 31, 2021
Infrastructure project will address coastal erosion, sea level rise
To protect homes, businesses, public infrastructure and recreational spaces, the city of Pacifica is moving ahead with planning to improve the outdated infrastructure along Beach Boulevard where its famous pier can be found.
“The inception of this project can really be dated back to when the sea walls were built in the 1980s in the area,” Ryan Marquez, the project manager, said. “The infrastructure of the sea walls are coming to the end of their useful life. And so this project has come as a result of multiple failures along the existing sea walls in combination with sea level rise.”
The Beach Boulevard Infrastructure Resiliency Project will replace the current seawall and infrastructure. The project is assessing the entire span of the current infrastructure and seawall including four different structures, the north wall, the pier sheet pile wall, the south wall and south gap.
It had a full wall breach in 2016 and other smaller failures in the winter of 2019 to 2020 and winter of 2020-21, Marquez said.
“Most of them are hypothesized to be from similar style failures from essentially waves getting behind the wall and the water pulling material out from the back side of the wall, leaving the wall and the promenade unsupported,” he said.
The project is to protect West Sharp Park homes and businesses from overtopping, coastal erosion and future sea level rise, and to have secured public infrastructure of roads and underlying sewer mains, storm drains and gas and electrical conduit, improved public access to the beach, and protection of recreational use on the promenade.
“There’s many homes, single-family homes and apartment buildings for multifamily homes. There’s the pier in the area which attracts thousands of visitors a year for fishing and sightseeing. There’s a Sharp Park Golf Course in the area, which is low-cost golfing,” Marquez said. “So this project is really multibenefited. It’s really looking at honing in on protecting the infrastructure and planning for the infrastructure in the future in the area, but also cognizant of how much use the area has for both recreation and for folks’ homes.”
It is broken down into three phases. The first phase, planning and feasibility, was completed in June of this year. The team looked at the current and future conditions of the site and used that information to come up with different alternatives to address the various hazards in the area and narrowed it down to a single alternative which is the preferred alternative.
Phase two is designing the preferred alternative and stage three is starting construction. The project is at the end of phase one and the beginning of phase two, which will take about two to five years.
Additionally, the Pacifica Municipal Pier Repair Project is currently in design after getting recent state funding to assist with the fix, Marquez said.
The city safely opened the portion of the pier that runs perpendicular to the shoreline in April of this year. The section of the pier running parallel to the shoreline, where the railing was broken from the pier deck, is currently fenced off and closed to public access.
This past January, high tides and large waves damaged a 40-foot section of the Pacifica Municipal Pier’s west-facing deck and concrete railing. Railing sections were identified as severely damaged, including 36 panels with major damage and another 44 panels with severe damage. The project is focused on repairing the 40-foot section that was damaged, along with the 80 panels identified with major or severe damage.
Assembly Speaker pro Tem Kevin Mullin, D-South San Francisco, had a joint request with state Sen. Josh Becker, D-San Mateo, for $500,000 to repair and replace damage to the Pacifica Municipal Pier. The city received funding for the project through Senate Bill 129, also known as the June 28 Budget Package which was signed by the Gov. Gavin Newsom July 12.
