Thousands of locals, tourists and fishermen enjoy Newport Beach’s two iconic ocean piers, and for the next few months, crews will make sure they are sturdy and ready for continued use.
“It’s a big cost for coastal cities to maintain these piers,” said Dave Webb, director of public works for the city.
The Newport Pier was initially built for commerce, he pointed out. “When it was a working pier, it made sense, it had commerce on it, and you were making money, but it’s really just a tourist attraction. But Newport is known for its piers, and a lot of people come and use them.”
The council recently budgeted $717,000 for this year’s maintenance projects, which include replacing broken or damaged piles, fixing the stringers and frames underneath the piers, replacing corroded and rusted-out metal hardware and bolts, and installing vinyl “jackets” to protect against marine organisms that bore into the wood. That project, Webb said, is done every two years.
In the off years, Webb said smaller repairs are made, but the piers are also inspected as part of a “marine investigation” to assess larger needs. Crews view the piers — sometimes with assistance from drones — from above and below the water, and return with a recommendation on what needs to be addressed, such as the repairs being tackled now.
While there is one broken pile that needs replacing on the Newport Pier, the city’s longest and most popular pier for fishermen, Webb said, the repair list is not as great as in some years, when severe storms have caused more damage. Among the largest amounts paid by the city for major pier maintenance, Webb said, was about $2 million.
“That year we had a lot of Pacific storms and a lot of waves and actions and beach erosion that took out several piles,” he said, adding that piles are a big cost.
The thorough inspections are needed routinely because of the damage that is a natural result of harsh marine conditions.
“Just the constant pounding of the sea, and because they’re wood, they flex a little bit,” Webb said. “There’s the all-the-time maintenance where something breaks like a railing and then there’s the bigger stuff that requires special equipment to get under there.”
Current repairs started this week are expected to take until Memorial Day. Despite the equipment that will be needed, Webb said visitors to the pier should still be able to walk from the land side to the end because most of the work will be done underwater and beneath the piers. The most invasive project this year, he said, is replacing the broken pile.
“It’s capital maintenance, it’s not like we need to close down a whole section of the pier,” Webb said.
The oldest pier is the Newport Pier, which is at 26th Street at the center of the Balboa Peninsula, right near McFadden Plaza. It’s about 1,032 feet in length, Webb said, and is registered as a California Historical Landmark. It was built in 1939 and replaced the historic McFadden Wharf, which brought commerce to the area when built in 1888 by landowners James and Robert McFadden.
“They used it to ship in lumber from the Northwest,” Webb said. “And, they’d ship other products like cattle and hides off it. They eventually built a railway from the pier all the way to Santa Ana, which helped build Santa Ana.”
But the original pier was destroyed by storms, he said, and it was eventually rebuilt with the current structure.
The Balboa Pier, which Webb said has always been more of a tourist pier, was built in 1906 as the sister project to the Balboa Pavilion. Both were used to attract investors who would later build properties on the sandy Balboa Peninsula.
The Balboa Pier was also where Orange County’s first Ruby’s Diner opened. To hold a restaurant out there, Webb said the pier has to be especially reinforced. The Newport Pier also once had a restaurant at the end, but Webb said it was removed years ago.
“You wouldn’t want to put a new facility out there on a very old pier,” he said, adding that there have been some city discussions about the Newport Pier’s future and what it should look like, including whether it should have a restaurant again and if the restaurant would be better suited closer to shore, like it is in San Clemente.
“If you want to go for a quick dinner, it’s more convenient,” he said. “If you put it way out there, there’s a certain segment of the population that won’t walk that far out there for dinner, or it’s a good walk after dinner.”
He also added that fishermen like to be at the farthest point on the pier where the water is deeper for their lines.
“There are different purposes for it,” he said of the pier.
At some point, Webb said, as the maintenance costs for the wood piers continue to rise, it might make sense to rebuild the Newport Beach piers with concrete, like what was done in Huntington Beach, when the pier was significantly damaged underneath and had to be replaced.
“The Newport Pier would be the next candidate,” he said, of the city’s two piers. “We just keep putting a lot of money into maintenance, and it is an old wood pier. At some point, they’ll have to make a decision to replace it or just keep putting more money into it.”
For now, though, the piers are just getting ready for summer.
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