Massive swells from Hurricane Marie peeled back layers of sand at Newport Beach's legendary Wedge, unearthing wooden pilings and steel cables believed to date to a 1917 harbor construction project.
The storm churned hundreds of miles offshore in an El Niño-supercharged Pacific, but its reach was long enough to send punishing surf into the Southern California coast over Labor Day Weekend. At The Wedge, a narrow strip of beach at the tip of the Balboa Peninsula famous for its shore-breaking waves, the erosion went deep. Beachgoers watched as the retreating sand revealed a row of weathered wooden pilings jutting roughly seven feet into the air, along with chunks of jetty rock and rusted steel cables that had sat buried and forgotten for decades.
Newport Beach city officials moved quickly. Crews sawed down the exposed pilings and hauled them off the shoreline, calling the removal a safety precaution. What they carted away, according to one local historian, was a physical piece of the city's earliest infrastructure, remnants of a temporary wooden trestle used to build Newport Harbor's original west jetty more than a century ago.
Don Webb, a former Newport Beach mayor, retired public works director, and member of the Newport Beach Historical Society, said the exposed wood almost certainly belongs to that first jetty project. In 1917, workers loaded railroad cars with rock and rolled them along a wooden trestle extending out over the ocean to build the west jetty. When construction finished, crews removed only the visible portions of the trestle. The rest stayed buried under sand and sea.
Webb told Fox Weather he is confident the site never supported a pier or any other public structure:
"To the best of my knowledge, based on many years of reviewing plans and reports on the area, there has never been a pier in that vicinity."
That matters because the find initially sparked speculation among locals about a long-lost pier. Webb's assessment, grounded in years of reviewing city plans and historical records, points instead to the unglamorous but essential engineering that created the harbor entrance Newport Beach depends on today.
The original west jetty did not last long. By 1920, storms had heavily damaged much of the structure, forcing major repairs. The jetty was reconstructed and extended in 1928, and engineers added new shore-protection measures. Two groins, low walls of rock designed to trap sand and slow erosion, were built at the jetty's base around 1930. Additional federal and local harbor improvements followed through the mid-1930s.
Webb believes portions of one of those 1930-era groins may also be resurfacing alongside the older trestle timber. Historical photographs from the Newport Beach Historical Society show the progression: a 1917 image captures a railroad cart loaded with rocks rolling along the temporary trestle during construction, an April 1928 aerial view shows the rebuilt Newport Bay entrance, and a 1930 aerial documents the addition of the west jetty groins.
Each photograph records a layer of work that eventually disappeared beneath the sand, until Hurricane Marie's swells stripped the cover away.
The Wedge needs no archaeological curiosity to attract attention. The surf break is one of the most famous, and most dangerous, in California. Waves refract off the west jetty and collide with incoming swells, producing steep, fast-breaking walls of water that draw surfers, bodysurfers, and boogie boarders from across the state. A separate south swell event on June 9, 2026, sent wave heights at The Wedge to a reported 20 feet, and hundreds of spectators lined the beach to watch riders take on the conditions.
But the Hurricane Marie episode added something the regulars had never seen. Witnesses at the beach estimated the wooden pilings stood about seven feet above the sand, tall enough to pose a real hazard to anyone tumbling through the shorebreak. City officials did not wait for a formal historical assessment before cutting them down.
Whether the steel cables and exposed jetty rock were also removed, or remain buried in the surf zone, is unclear. No formal archaeological review of the materials has been announced. And the question of which specific groin Webb believes is resurfacing, or how much more of the 1917 trestle might still lie beneath The Wedge, remains unanswered.
The speed of the sequence is worth noting. It took decades of sand accumulation to bury the trestle. It took one hurricane's swell to dig it back up. And it took city crews only days to saw it down and haul it away, a safety call, but one that removed physical evidence of Newport Beach's earliest harbor engineering before anyone could study it in place.
Webb and the Historical Society have the photographs. The city has the pilings, or whatever is left of them. What no one has, yet, is a complete accounting of what Hurricane Marie uncovered and what was lost when the saws came out.
Nature has a way of reminding a city what it built on. The shame would be if nobody bothered to look before cleaning up.
