Capitola Village and wharf: Storm-smashed then, storm-smashed now

A huge storm and high tide that sent waves topping 20 feet slamming into the tourist mecca of Capitola last week, wreaking severe damage upon the city’s historic wharf and waterfront restaurant row, was highly dramatic — but not an anomaly.

Capitola has been a storm target since its early days as the privately owned “Camp Capitola” seaside resort, long before its incorporation as a city in 1949. And the wharf that lost a 40-foot section Jan. 5? It’s been there before. And not just once.

Capitola Village, long a beloved coastal getaway for Bay Area residents and a destination for visitors from all over the world, sits along a south-facing beach on a broad cove just down the coast from Santa Cruz on Monterey Bay. A 2017 City of Capitola report notes that “significant storms, with associated damage, strike the Monterey Bay communities with a frequency of one large storm every 3 to 4 years,” and that, “This equates to a 25% to 33% chance of a large storm occurring within Capitola in a given year.” Climate change effects on the Pacific Ocean, and on Soquel Creek that flows between Capitola Village’s colorful Venetian apartments and its beachfront restaurants as it meets the ocean, “could increase the probability and intensity of flooding in Capitola,” the report says.

Capitola Historical Museum curator Deborah Osterberg dug back into the past 100 years and compiled a litany of weather-wrought catastrophes befalling the Capitola village and wharf.

In 1913, a surging ocean full of debris swept across the beach, into the village and up Capitola Avenue. “Huge waves smashed against the wharf, taking out a 200-foot section,” Osterberg said. A fisherman named Alberto Gibelli, who had gone out to the end of the wharf to secure his boats and equipment, was left stranded until a rescue boat arrived and a rope and life preserver were tossed. Gibelli “tied the rope under his arms and leapt into the ocean and he was pulled to safety,” Osterberg said.

That storm destroyed a section of the wharf in the same area as the portion washed away lasts week. According to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, during episodes of very high surf, a sandbar develops near the Capitola Wharf in roughly the same spot. “This influences where waves will crest and unleash their force,” the museum tweeted Saturday, with photos of the damage in 1913 and 2023. “Hence, history repeating itself.”

Thirteen years later, Mother Nature struck again, with the same kind of double-whammy delivered to Capitola last week: giant waves on top of a high tide. Again, the village was flooded as far as Capitola Avenue, a block from the ocean. And as occurred last week, the Venetian apartments — the picturesque row of habitations starring today in many a social media post — suffered damage. So high were the waves that they slammed into the Hotel Capitola’s second floor. A bathhouse and boathouse with distinctive arches in its beachfront facade made it through, but its wooden dressing rooms were splintered apart.