Quick Take:
Grand Avenue’s coastal walkway in Capitola faces possible permanent closure after a partial collapse in February, as officials weigh engineering challenges, private property issues and the relentless erosion of the oceanfront cliff.
Capitola officials say saving a popular coastal walkway that partially collapsed into the ocean earlier this year could be extremely difficult, citing a tangle of obstacles including private property lines and a continuously eroding cliff face.
Houses and other private structures block potential new routes, storm drains could need extensive relocation, and engineers fear the cliff itself could crumble further within six years. Officials warn any new pathway might suffer the same fate as the section that fell 80 feet into the Pacific in February.
The Capitola City Council will hear a staff report on the Grand Avenue pathway and discuss the next steps for the deteriorating structure at its Thursday evening meeting.
In February, a piece of the pathway between Oakland Avenue and Saxon Avenue on the coastal side of the wooden fence separating the path from the edge of the cliff broke off and fell about 80 feet into the ocean below. The city promptly shut down the path to foot traffic.
The path has crumbled before. In 2017, the section between Oakland Avenue and Hollister Avenue began to fail, just a block away from the March collapse. The 2023 storms caused issues in the same section that collapsed in February, according to the city.
The city hired Pacific Crest Engineering to evaluate the February collapse. The firm found “fragile marine terrace deposits” in the area that are especially prone to failing when saturated by rain. The firm warned that even with interventions such as drainage improvements, the path could still be threatened in under a decade without stabilizing the entire cliff, which would be both an expensive and highly involved project.
Relocating the path between Saxon Avenue and Oakland Avenue is likely impossible because the only way to keep an 8-foot-wide pathway is to remove some improvements that nearby property owners have made, such as fences and landscaping. The city would need to determine which properties encroach onto public land, verify property boundaries and contact affected property owners. Shifting the path away from the cliff will likely require moving storm drain inlets and pipes.
Engineers also worry that a new path would not last long. An engineering report shows that the top of the bluff could erode even more within the next six years, reducing the space to shift or rebuild the path.
If the city council decides to move forward with a new path, it would require having a civil engineer perform a feasibility study to determine drainage requirements, and the long-term viability of the relocated path. This would require “considerable staff time for field work, legal coordination, outreach, and design.”
City staff offered two alternatives: permanently closing the path at Saxon Avenue, which would require a coastal development permit and might be appealed to the Coastal Commission, or stabilizing the eroding cliff, using plans the Depot Hill Bluff citizen’s group first floated in 2018 after previous collapse. That could mean filling eroded areas or building seawalls, but both of which would take a lot of time and money, the city’s staff report said. The meeting begins Thursday at 6 p.m.