Cleaning up

In the wee hours of Sunday 12 August 2018, the F/V Pacific Quest ran aground near Terrace Point. Over the next 24 hours she broke apart and began leaking diesel fuel into Monterey Bay. Fortunately most of the diesel was removed from the wreck, but the boat itself continued to disintegrate, with a lot of the debris washing up on the nearby shoreline. Due to the wreck’s position on the beach, clean-up crews have access to it only at low tide. We are now getting into a period of neap tides, limiting the time that people and equipment can be safely deployed on the beach. The good news is that after a delay yesterday due to an electrical problem, the removal of the Pacific Quest itself has begun.

The real deconstruction of the boat started during the evening low tide on 15 August.  It was supposed to start on the morning low tide, but there was a problem with the equipment and the crew spent the day waiting for and installing parts. The salvage crew used a crane to lower a small excavator onto the beach, which gathered debris into a large pile. The excavator was also used to smash the remains of the boat into smaller pieces, so the crane could hoist them up the cliff. My husband walked down to the lab and took some video of the action:

I was at the lab on the morning of 16 August and took some pictures, too. The coastal access pathway is blocked around the area where the salvagers are working, so I could get only so close. Plus, the lighting conditions were about as bad as daylight can be, for taking photos: I was shooting directly into a bright morning sun, with a lot of fog in the air. As a result these photos aren’t great, or even good, but they give a sense of what was going on at the time.

This picture of the crane was taken before any actual clean-up activity had started. The crane is positioned near the edge of the cliff on the coastal access trail. In this photo it is swiveled 180° away from the cliff.

While the crane was being fired up and moved into working position, two guys were on the beach using an excavator on the beach remove debris from the deck of the F/V Pacific Quest into a pile on the beach itself:

Then salvage workers attached a piece of debris to the line that was lowered by the crane:

And the crane began to lift up the chunk of debris:

And finally the piece of wreckage was taken off the beach:

I imagine the same sequence of events was repeated many times that morning, as often as the tide would allow. I hope the salvage guys are also picking up the flotsam that was carried to other beaches. The work will be limited by the tides. Fortunately we’re into neap tides now, which is a mixed blessing. The highs and lows won’t be as extreme as they were a week ago, resulting in less time that the crew can work on the beach (bad) as well as tides that are less likely to wash flotsam off the beach and back into the water (good).

The last I heard, the clean-up at the Terrace Point site was supposed to be completed by Saturday. That’s tomorrow. Today (Friday 17 August) I went out to the point and had a nice chat with the security guy, who updated me on the progress. He said the crew removed the rest of the boat and a fuel tank yesterday. And the site of the original wreck is now clear of large pieces of boat:

There is one more fuel tank on the other side of that point, which the salvage crew will work on removing this evening at 20:00h when the tide will be low again. There are also people picking up debris on the Natural Bridges side of the point.

It isn’t easy, working in these conditions, and once the immediate hazard of additional fuel discharge was abated the clean-up seems to have made slow but steady progress. Most of the flotsam is already gone, except for the inevitable little pieces that will get missed in this initial burst of clean-up activity. This Sunday, a week after the initial shipwreck, a visitor to the beach will not know that anything of interest happened here. Those of us who live and work and study here will remember, though.