GeoEngineers is helping the City of San Diego replace the Ocean Beach Pier, an iconic landmark in the Ocean Beach community and one of the longest piers on the West Coast. Originally built in 1966, the concrete pier had deteriorated and had been intermittently closed due to storm damage over the past 5 to ten years. The city is preparing to build a modernized 2,000-foot replacement pier with design elements that focus on sustainability during construction and operational maintenance. The new pier is also designed to be resilient in the long term, with features to protect it against the harsh marine environment and potential sea level rise.
A GeoEngineers team led by Matthew Martinez and Yichi Du provided geotechnical investigation services for the project as a sub-consultant to Moffatt & Nichol Engineers. Although the GeoEngineers team completed initial onshore explorations last year, in addition to geophysical surveying (landside and marine) in May of 2024, they also needed additional offshore geotechnical data—and that meant drilling directly from the deck of the dilapidated pier.
“Drilling over water or from a pier is always challenging,” Matthew explains. “In this case, we had to core through the pier and then lower drilling equipment down to the mudline to collect core samples of the Point Loma Formation, which is the material that the piles for the proposed pier will be ‘socketed’ or embedded into.”
Drilling from an elevated platform is complex, but the team was ready and able to deal with challenges as they arose. After completing the geotechnical and geophysical investigations, the GeoEngineers team finalized the engineering and seismic design recommendations for the geotechnical report that will inform the pier’s preliminary design.
