Apartment building near crumbling Pacifica cliff is torn down

Two big orange excavators and a work crew in yellow hats ended all speculation over the fate of one of the imperiled cliffside apartment buildings in Pacifica on Thursday, demolishing it before the Pacific Ocean could have its turn. The two-story building at 330 Esplanade Ave. was just south of similarly situated apartment buildings at 310 and 320 Esplanade. Thursday’s demolition, hashed out in recent public hearings, was undertaken by the building’s owner, Farshid Samsami of Burlingame, said Sarah Coffey, executive assistant to the Pacifica city manager. On Jan. 25, a wet and windy storm sent a balcony at 310 Esplanade — and part of the hillside immediately to the west of it — plunging into the ocean 80 feet below. City inspectors then posted yellow tags on that building, allowing residents to enter their apartments only to remove possessions. At 330 Esplanade on Thursday, the giant machines were perched only a few feet from the edge, knocking down and gobbling up the wood and stucco and spitting it into a giant truck to be hauled off. The machines — two excavators, two dump trucks, a flatbed truck and a water tanker — had swept into the neighborhood in the morning and had largely completed their work by late afternoon. The demolition was new, but the commotion was not, considering the three apartment buildings have been endangered and slipping closer to oblivion for years. Willoughby said scores of other apartments lie within a few hundred feet of the Esplanade cliff edge, and that the erosion shows no signs of stopping. The buildings were constructed in 1962, at a time when the bluff was big enough to accommodate playgrounds and even a swimming pool in the space between the apartments and the edge of the cliff. In the intervening years, natural forces have eaten away at the cliff, and the buildings, like oversized lemmings, have appeared to creep closer and closer to their doom.