Two years ago, we stopped in Avila only to find the beach fenced off and huge excavators removing the sand. Four blocks of Front Street, the heart of the town, had been demolished. Massive oil leakage had been discovered under the waterfront and beach sand. Our Avila Beach had been destroyed in the name of oil spill cleanup.

Nobody knows how long the oil had been there, underground and seeping into the groundwater, beach sand, and soil under Front Street. In 1977 an explosion in the basement of a Front Street restaurant closed the restaurant for a time, but did not start a search for related damage. Then in 1988, a Front Street property owner found diesel fuel and crude oil during a routine soil test on a vacant lot opposite the pier, where he planned to build a shop.

The extent of the problem was not fully appreciated until the mid-1990s, when Unocal calculated that 400,000 gallons of petroleum products (crude oil, diesel fuel, and gasoline) had leaked from buried pipelines that connected an oil-storage tank farm with an offshore terminal for loading ships. An Environmental Impact Report (EIR) analyzed three options for cleaning up the underground pollution: solidification, bioremediation, and excavation. For a variety of reasons, authorities chose to remove the contaminated soil. And this meant the destruction of Front Street.

“Why did they have to destroy Avila?” my kids have asked me. I try to explain that they had to destroy downtown to save it, but I also ask myself if the cure is worse than the disease and whether it is, in fact, a cure for the problem. As of now, there are no clear answers.

This much we do know: Even after beach sand is scooped back into place and smoothed down to resemble its former profile, after Front Street is rebuilt, the Avila we cherished will not return. Gone will be the charming haphazard juxtaposition of buildings and vacant lots, the measure of funkiness we appreciated in Avila. Gone will be the “familiar”—like the feeling you get when you put on your favorite old t-shirt.

What will the “new” Avila be like? What will it feel like? I tell my kids that they are lucky to have so many great memories of the “old” Avila.

SAN LUIS OBISPO'S BEACH TOWN

With its public pier and its south-facing, safe swimming beach, Avila Beach enjoyed a reputation as a laid-back beach town, accessible to all, from college students and pier fishermen to moms with kids. It was San Luis Obispo County residents’ warm seaside escape.

“Downtown” Avila Beach was established over several decades, starting in the early 1900s on the sand spit fronting San Luis Creek lagoon. The original town plat was laid out long before, in the 1870s, but it was the discovery of oil south of Avila in the Santa Maria Valley that led to Avila's growth. In 1906 the Union Oil Company of California built a pipeline to carry crude oil from fields in northern Santa Barbara County and constructed a tank farm to store the oil on the hillside just east of downtown Avila. A pipeline ran from the tank farm under Front Street to the end of Avila Pier, where it filled tankers carrying oil to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 1909, Union Oil participated in the construction of a 245-mile pipeline from the San Joaquin Valley. Later, the company built a new pier just west of downtown, and expanded the tank farm to accommodate oil coming in from the Guadalupe Oil Field, to be processed at Union's Santa Maria refinery nearby. Between 1914 and 1922, San Luis Bay became the largest crude oil shipping port in the world.

As oil activity grew, Front Street began to develop with wooden commercial buildings. The Avila Grocery, Front Street's oldest and most prominent structure, was built in 1917. The Old Custom House restaurant opened in 1927 and operated for nearly 75 years, a favorite haunt of locals and visitors. In 1937 the federal Works Progress Administration built a seawall between Front Street and the beach. In 1948 Avila changed its name to Avila Beach to attract out-of-county tourists. For the past 30 years, it has drawn ocean-swimming clubs, kayakers, body surfers, boogie boarders, and other water enthusiasts.

Union Oil continued to operate the system of underground pipelines beneath the town until the 1980s, moving oil from tank farm to tanker ships. In addition, gasoline and diesel fuel were pumped from tankers to the tank farm for distribution to customers in the area.

UNDERGROUND POLLUTION DISCOVERED

After the 1977 explosion under Front Street damaged the Chief's Gallery restaurant, the County Health Department and the volunteer fire department ordered an engineer to “seal” the foundation wall of the building before the restaurant reopened. There was no oil cleanup or investigation. People apparently thought, “Oh, well, leaking oil pipes—no big deal.”

But by 1988, when the oil spill was detected in the ground on Front Street, attitudes had changed and new environmental laws were in effect. The Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board issued a Cleanup and Abatement Order (94-85) requiring Union Oil (in 1985 renamed Unocal) to determine the extent of contamination. The company found this contamination followed the alignment of pipes between the tank farm and both piers. As it studied the extent of the problem, Unocal also began to “remediate” it by installing a soil vapor-extraction system along Front Street. It operated this system for two years, removing volatile hydrocarbons from underground, filtering the vapors, and transporting them to the tank farm where they were burned.

Unocal maintained that threats to the environment and public health were minimal because the underground contamination was inert, “asphalt-like.” But neither the public nor government agencies accepted the company's health-risk assessment. Continued analysis by the company confirmed large-scale contamination under most of Front Street and under the beach sands in front of downtown. As this information reached the news media, a clamor for cleanup arose. By 1997 the County had hired Alvin Greenberg, a noted toxicologist and public health specialist, to assess the situation. He concluded that the town's residents and beach visitors faced no immediate health risk.

BIOREMEDIATION VS. EXCAVATION

Community pressure, publicity, and the extent of the pollution compelled the Regional Water Quality Board to direct Unocal to clean it up. The oil company recommended this be done by biosparging, a type of bioremediation, in which natural bacterial consumption of hydrocarbons is accelerated. It was estimated that this process could remove up to 80 percent of the underground oil, but would take at least a decade.

An EIR prepared by Arthur D. Little Associates at the request of the County, the water board, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, however, recommended excavating the contaminated soil, as the best way to clean up the most contamination in the least time.

Because there was no evidence that the contamination posed immediate danger to human health or safety, bioremediation seemed worth considering. (It would be much cheaper, but this didn't matter to Avila since the oil company was picking up the bill.) Pete Kelley, owner of Pete's Seaside Cafe on Front Street from 1977 to 1985, was among those who did not want to sacrifice historic Front Street. Kelley was a surfer and long-distance ocean swimmer, he had appreciated the fine qualities of Avila Beach for 40 years, and he argued that “pollution problems 50 years or more in the making cannot necessarily be solved with short-term fixes such as the excavation project.”

Yet because bioremediation had been proposed by the oil company, and might take ten years, it was met with suspicion by residents and business people who feared losing tourist dollars. According to County Supervisor Peg Pinard, who represents Avila, “the residents of Avila were extraordinarily wary.”

The die was cast for excavation when banks and other lending institutions made it clear that they would not fund any property improvements or new construction until cleanup was complete. Unocal offered two property loan programs through banks, with the company as guarantor, but only one property owner applied for each. “Excavation was the only alternative available which could provide total closure for residents and property owners and let them get on with their lives,” explained Pinard.

There was another reason, unrelated to the oil spill, for citizens' unwillingness to accept a slow form of cleanup. When local property owner Mike Rudd struck oil in his Front Street lot, a 17-year moratorium on water hookups had just been lifted. All that time, nobody had been able to build. As a result, buildings stood empty and in disrepair, and vacant lots were gathering trash on Front Street. The moratorium was lifted when Avila Beach Community Services District (CSD) signed a contract for water from the State Water Project. Long-delayed improvements were at last on the horizon. The oil cleanup again stopped everything. People were getting impatient.

In the end, the combination of corporate stonewalling and scientific uncertainty made an objective analysis impossible, according to Bud Laurent, then a County supervisor, now head of the Community Environmental Council in Santa Barbara. “Uncertainty made people mistrustful,” Laurent said, “therefore they demanded a solution that could bring an end to the uncertainty.”

There were also other motives for favoring the demolition option. It opened the way for new development that might otherwise have faced community opposition. Money would flow into Avila for public works projects. Unocal would be encouraged to hire local contractors to do the work. Such incentives helped drive the decision to destroy the street and the beach.

The task was gigantic. Unocal bought up properties on Front Street, demolished some and moved others. Part of the public pier was demolished, the beach was fenced, and contaminated sand—100,000 cubic yards or 6,750 truckloads—hauled to a landfill west of Bakersfield. Unocal will pay in full (at an undisclosed cost). It has already paid a reported $20 million to acquire property, in addition to cleanup costs, plus an $18 million settlement to the government.

WILL THE OIL REALLY BE CLEANED UP?

In autumn 1999, immediately after the first phase of the excavation was completed, Regional Water Quality Control Board staff judged the outcome “even better than expected,” with very low pollution levels in the excavated area. Groundwater will be monitored for a year. Clean sand has been brought in from the nearby Guadalupe Dunes and the Oso Flaco area of the Nipomo Dunes, and most of the beach is now open. The remainder, around the pier, will reopen when pier reconstruction is complete, probably in July.

When the cleanup is finished, will Avila Beach be free of oil contamination? The subtidal area immediately below the pier is still being studied, and the soil at and around the now-closed tank farm has not been examined.

As for the town, Front Street is to be completely rebuilt this year, with a new block-sized pedestrian plaza off-limits to vehicles, as well as a new community park and new seawall, landscaping, observation deck, pier plaza, public restroom, and lifeguard buildings. The original Avila Grocery and Yacht Club buildings will be returned to their former locations by the pier, but the single-story Old Custom House will be replaced by a new and bigger restaurant and bar seating 300 people altogether. Front Street is expected to be fully built out with private buildings in three to five years.

Unocal now owns at least 17 properties, mostly on Front Street, which it intends to sell to “responsible parties who are committed to the area, are a known entity, and take the process of redevelopment as seriously as Unocal does,” according to Mark Smith, general manager of the company's Central Coast Group.

The county has also approved the Avila Beach Specific Plan, which is to govern the public spaces. Its stated goal is to “retain the character of the old Avila Beach while offering common amenities found in newer beach towns.” Although many people loved old laid-back Avila, there were also those who felt it had been frozen in time, first by the water hookup moratorium and then by the discovery of the spill.

One thing seems certain: as so often happens with redevelopment, a new dynamic is now at work that will dictate a higher cost of living. With the water issue and the oil pollution ostensibly solved, the charms of Avila Beach are certain to attract high-priced development interest.

The rising cost of water will also determine who can afford to live in Avila Beach. During the past five years, Unocal paid the $90,000 annual charge for State Water Project water. Now the Community Services District will have to foot the bill. Water and sewer service per household amounted to $300 a month before the state water contract. That cost may well triple.

LIVING WITH UNCERTAINTY

The story of Avila offers lessons that may be valuable in other California coastal communities—such as Guadalupe, El Segundo/Manhattan Beach, and cities along the East Bay shoreline of Contra Costa County—given the age of many oil company facilities.

It is possible Front Street did not have to be sacrificed, but the fact that bioremediation was tainted as Unocal's preference and could take a decade or more, meant it was not a viable political option.

In the beginning, with no data of their own, local agencies had to rely on oil company information, and the public came to believe that the problem was being downplayed. Even information from an independent toxicologist was disdained, though it showed no significant health risk. Perhaps it was done too late. As things turned out, fatigue and politics, rather than science, carried the day. Assessment of California's aging oil pipeline network should be a high priority for state agencies. With such information, it might have been possible to gauge public health risks when contamination was discovered in Avila.

Whether anyone who loved coming to “the beach” as it used to be will feel at home in the new Avila remains to be seen. However, on a recent visit I found children playing in the sand, couples and families strolling along the water's edge, and outrigger canoes returning from a row on the bay. On that morning I was buoyed by the feeling that “the beach” at Avila will be there for my children’s kids.

Marc Beyeler, a longtime Conservancy staffer, has been visiting Avila Beach for decades.