Local News in Brief : Huntington Beach : Pier to Be Rebuilt With Plastic-Coated Pilings

The 77-year-old Huntington Beach Pier, closed last summer after officials deemed it unsafe, will be rebuilt out of plastic-coated steel pilings that resist corrosion.

The City Council voted, 7 to 0, Monday night to adopt the recommendation of a citizens committee to use the polyethylene-covered steel, a relatively new alternative for rebuilding concrete and wood piers.

Engineers told the committee last month that using concrete would add as much as a year to reconstruction of the pier, perhaps crippling the city’s ambitious downtown redevelopment plans.

Moffatt & Nichol Engineers of Long Beach told the committee that the pier could be rebuilt with wood at about one-third the cost of concrete, but that wood also has only a third the life span of concrete.

The committee--made up of citizens, development representatives, merchants and two council members--has not yet made a recommendation on what material should be used to rebuild the pier’s deck. However, members said, steel has been ruled out.

High seas that pounded the coast a year ago this month ripped off 250 feet of the pier’s seaward end, including a restaurant. Engineers told city officials in July that the steel skeleton of the 1,800-foot pier and its cross beams had eroded so severely that it was no longer safe.

Once the roughly $10 million to pay for rebuilding the pier is secured, reconstruction should take about a year, engineers say. City officials say they hope to reopen the pier by late spring, 1991.