Holden Beach commissioners vote 3-2 to pursue pier replacement with engineer

Representatives of HDR Engineering Inc., the Wilmington engineering firm Holden Beach’s town board voting block of Commissioners Rick Paarfus, Tracey Thomas and Mayor Pro Tem Tom Myers awarded an engineering services contract at a special meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 28, returned at the March 18 town meeting with a preliminary assessment of the pier structure.

HDR Engineering’s scope of services began with looking at the possibility of repairing the pier or determining if a full reconstruction was needed.

HDR Senior Engineer Bill Kincannon and Project Manager Will Fuller attended the March meeting with a recommendation for a full reconstruction.

“The overall condition of the existing fishing pier was assessed to be in poor condition, and HDR recommends replacing the timber superstructure in its entirety, the pier approach, superstructure and substructure will also be required to be replaced in its entirety to satisfy federal ADA requirements. The existing substructure has many structural deficiencies, which would require extensive repairs and is currently at the end of its useful service life. This, coupled with the fact the recommended construction methods would be similar for both repair and replacement options, supports the conclusion that repairing the existing pier would not be structurally cost effective, nor would it provide the longevity or service life that results from replacing the timber fishing pier. Therefore, it is HDR recommendation that the town consider a pier replacement option only,” HDR stated in their pier engineering summary presented to the town board.

The HDR engineering services contract included providing underwater and above water inspections and condition assessments, plans for preliminary design and a 30-year maintenance and repair draft plan and cost estimates for repairing the pier as well as a preliminary design covering full reconstruction of the pier structure, a 30-year maintenance and repair draft plan and cost estimates under a services contract for $250,870.

“This is just purely HDR’s recommendation from these initial findings. From those findings, the bottom line, up front, is that the repair does not have a good chance of being cost-effective in the end. There is a lot of structural deficiencies up and down, ranging from the superstructure basically needing entirely to be replaced to the substructure having numerous amount of pilings that have known issues along with the pilings all being at the end of their service life or well beyond their service life. That’s how we arrived at our assessment,” Fuller said.

“Also to clarify, we’ll have a full report that’ll be coming in several more weeks as well that’s going to expand upon these initial findings.”

The target date for the draft of the review date is April 4, Fuller added.

“Following that submittal, the town will have a period to review it. Typically two to four weeks. That’s when the town will be able to comment if you have any questions and then we would finalize following that.”

“With the pier, anything is possible but does it make sense to do it? That’s why we wanted to give you an opportunity to look at this before we went down the path to looking at the repair option too much more,” Kincannon said.

“The substructure is in poor condition. The deck is in poor condition. The cross bracings are in poor condition. As you can see in the report, there’s not a whole lot of good to start with as far as repair of the pier. Ultimately while you could conceivably do it, because anything is possible, it would take a pretty significant effort and I think the quality of what you would end up with, and the service life would be questionable. It just might not make sense.

“We just want to let you know that you might want to consider going with looking at the cost for the reconstruction of the pier as opposed to a repair,” Kincannon said.

Fuller said they wanted to get the summary out to the board members because the first step in that repair option would be to continue the investigation with an underwater inspection.

“Our structural inspection that we carried out on March 3 did not include any underwater considerations. So these findings that we have here wouldn’t include any potential below the water line issues,” Fuller said.

“With that being the very first thing to come in the next line of events, I believe the (underwater inspection) was close to about a $25,000 fee. So you’re basically dropping $25,000 up front to continue any further. So we wanted to provide this recommendation before we started spending those dollars. Once they start getting spent that’s going to be a big snowball.”

“The pier is beyond its life cycle, so I think at this point I’d like to make a motion to accept HDR’s recommendation to pursue the pier replacement option only,” Paarfus said.

Thomas seconded the motion.

“Thank you very much I agree I think we need to just face reality and move forward with a new pier,” Myers said.

The commissioners voted 3-2 to pursue the pier replacement option with Paarfus, Thomas and Myers outvoting Commissioners Rick Smith and Page Dyer.