The Town That Was Dug Up

Underneath the boardwalk you see today, Avila Beach once held a secret that a corporation knew about for decades before the rest of the town did. The Unocal oil company operated a storage and pipeline facility here, transferring crude oil and refined fuel through pipes that ran beneath the commercial district, beneath the beach, beneath the foundations of homes and shops. At some point, the pipes began to fail. The company knew, or should have known. And the town above kept going about its business, entirely unaware of what was accumulating below.

Investigators began raising serious alarms in nineteen eighty-nine. When engineers and regulators finally mapped the full extent of the contamination in the mid-nineteen nineties, what they found was staggering: roughly four hundred thousand gallons of crude oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel saturating the soil and groundwater beneath downtown Avila Beach. Not a spill that had spread from a pipeline break. A slow, cumulative weeping that had been happening for years, possibly decades. One of the largest subsurface petroleum contamination events in California history, and it was right here, under a beach town, where families spread their towels.

The remediation plan, finalized in nineteen ninety-eight, required something almost without precedent: the demolition of virtually every structure in the commercial district of Avila Beach. Not a partial tear-down. Not selective removal. The town came down. More than four hundred thousand tons of contaminated soil and sand were excavated and hauled away. At least twenty-one homes and businesses were demolished. The estimated cost ran to two hundred million dollars. The settlement that Unocal paid in penalties and cleanup costs totaled sixty-two million dollars, a figure that most observers regarded as insufficient given the scale of the damage and the years of displacement.

Between nineteen ninety-eight and two thousand one, a new Avila Beach rose from the excavated ground. The boardwalk, the shops, the restaurants, the cheerful beachfront that visitors encounter today are essentially a reconstruction, built on the cleaned-out footprint of the town that corporate negligence destroyed.

Almost no one driving through knows this. The pleasant beach town gives no indication that within living memory its entire downtown was demolished, its soil hauled away in trucks. That is not an accident. It is the nature of reconstruction: it is designed to look like what it replaced, not like what it replaced replaced.