Two Piers at Goleta Beach?

Did you know that Goleta Beach once had two piers at the same time? Seems crazy, right? Well there’s a logical reason. And they didn’t last for long. The pier on the left was only temporary.

In the early 1960s Goleta was growing very fast. Completion of Lake Cachuma was a big green light for developers, and suburbs were replacing agriculture as fast as humanly possible. All of these homes had at least a couple of toilets in them, and all that sewage needed to go somewhere.

The Goleta Sanitary District was struggling to process all this “material”, so in 1965 they began the construction of a 36″ outfall pipe to discharge treated wastewater out into the ocean. The location they chose for that discharge was very close by at Goleta Beach.

Early in 1965, construction began on a 500 foot long temporary pier to assist in the laying of the pipeline that would carry the waste water a mile offshore. Almost immediately, the marine laboratory at UCSB “expressed concerns” that the outflow would affect samples they take from the ocean in that area. But, the work proceeded anyway, and most of Goleta Beach remained open to the public.

Contractors hired by the Goleta Sanitary District made a plan to construct a pipeline from the treatment plant, through the slough, 20 feet under the Goleta Beach sand and out to sea, releasing the material a mile out and at a depth of approximately 90 feet.

The 36″ pipe was made of steel and concrete and came in 40 foot lengths that each weighed 15 tons. The pipes would be welded together on the beach into 280 foot sections and pulled out to sea by a barge. Then new sections would be added to it until it reached out just over a mile.

Workers had to first get the water out of a section of the slough, dig a trench and bury the pipeline.

Meanwhile construction continued on the temporary pier, 200 feet west of the existing pier. The temporary pier was necessary for a crane to help dig a 20 foot deep trench that the pipe would be laid into and buried under ballast rock.

In July 1965 something unexpected happened. Goleta Beach had to be closed, not to facilitate the construction, but as a result of the construction. The new temporary pier was made with sheet pilings, basically a solid wall, that stopped the natural flow of the kelp down the coast and caused it to pile up on the sandy beach. And to make matters worse, the kelp cutter had passed through the area recently and large chunks of the severed kelp had floated freely to the shore.

A huge pile of rotting kelp started at the temporary pier and covered half the length of Goleta Beach and thirty feet up from the shore. The rotting kelp put out a stench “akin to rotten eggs” and the complaints forced the County Parks Director to close off much of the beach. The County tried to bury the kelp, but too much kept coming in. A County Health officer was quoted as saying, “Somethings got to be done!” Studies were done, experts were brought in, but no good solution was decided upon. Meanwhile the construction continued.

By August, they started pulling the sections out to sea and welding it all together. You can see all the pre-welded sections being stored in a staging area in the background.

The sections were pulled slowly into the water by cables from a tugboat and a barge. This process would take about five days to complete.

By September, the pipeline was near completion and contractors began pulling out the sheet piling, allowing the free flow of the current to resume, magically carrying the troublesome kelp away.

Once the pipeline was in place, 3,500 tons of ballast rock was dumped on top of the buried line. Dump trucks dropped the rock onto a conveyer belt that carried it to a barge that in turn dumped the rock onto the submerged line. Divers monitored the fall of the rock underwater.

Notice the dump truck in the yellow circle.

Once the project was finished, crews removed the temporary pier, and by the end of 1965, Goleta again had only one pier.

By 1967, Mother Nature had already began taking advantage of the new rock reef laid to anchor the pipeline. Kelp began attaching and growing along the pipeline.

In 1975, the artificial reef was more defined.

And by 2003, even more defined. It’s still there today, doing its job and providing an artificial reef of sorts.

So the next time you’re enjoying Goleta Beach, remember for a short while we had two piers. And every time you flush the toilet, one mile off this beach where it goes….