The pier cracked. The cafe where surfers plotted their fix was demolished. The federal grant Pacifica had been shortlisted for was canceled. Now the city's most plausible coastal defense plan is an underwater boulder field dreamed up over coffee by a civil engineer who also surfs.

A group of Pacifica surfers led by coastal hydraulics engineer Bob Battalio is proposing an artificial reef 600 feet off Beach Boulevard — 20,000 truckloads of boulders arranged point-first into the Pacific, designed to break waves before they finish off the aging seawall. The proposal, named "Rob's Reef" in honor of Surfrider Foundation founder Rob Caughlan, who died in January, would cost roughly $100 million on top of more than $80 million already needed for the seawall itself. The Trump administration has canceled the federal grant program Pacifica was counting on. Congress has a bill. The reef doesn't have money yet. Pacifica doesn't have time.

Bob Battalio, 67, is a Pacifica-based surfer and civil engineer who has spent his career in coastal hydraulics. He told KQED that waves striking the city's aging seawall along Beach Boulevard can feel like an earthquake and sound like "somebody shooting off a cannon." The force isn't hyperbole — the city regularly closes the road during violent winter surf, and the Pacifica Municipal Pier, a century-old landmark just south of Beach Boulevard, cracked structurally this month and is now closed indefinitely.

Battalio and his group's proposed fix: an offshore reef that would alter the wave energy at its source. Positioned 600 feet offshore in a triangular formation, the structure would reduce wave height before it reaches the seawall while allowing sand to accumulate and restore what the shoreline has lost — roughly two feet per year for decades. The reef's shape would also, as a secondary benefit, produce a rideable surfing wave in an area Battalio told KQED is currently too dangerous to paddle into.

"What we would like to do is create a new equilibrium by restoring the beach to its historical dimensions," Battalio told KQED in a piece published Monday. "Together they should reduce the wave height and the frequency of waves reaching the seawall."

An initial sand restoration — approximately 50,000 dump-truck loads — would accompany the reef. Total cost: around $100 million. That's separate from the city's more than $80 million seawall repair plan.

Where the money isn't

That combined $180 million sits atop a federal funding void. Last year, the Trump administration shortlisted Pacifica for a $50 million grant through FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program — one of the agency's signature pre-disaster mitigation tools. The administration then canceled BRIC entirely.

Congressman Sam Liccardo (CA-16) traveled to the cracked pier on June 15, joined by Mayor Christine Boles, City Manager Sean Charpentier, Chit Chat Cafe owner Ginger Davis, and state and county officials, to call for immediate federal aid and a state of emergency declaration. He also unveiled the "Ounce of Prevention Act" — legislation that would let local governments use Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) allocations for disaster mitigation before disasters strike, not only after. Under current law, CDBG-DR and CDBG-MIT funds are post-disaster programs.

Liccardo simultaneously wrote to the Trump administration demanding release of canceled BRIC funding and an extension for the Esplanade Infrastructure Preservation project — the existing effort to arrest erosion along the same stretch of coast the reef would protect. KQED's reef coverage, published eight days after Liccardo's press conference, did not mention the legislation.

The Ounce of Prevention Act exists on paper. Rob's Reef does not yet have funding. Pacifica and San Mateo County officials have applied for state grants to fund a feasibility study and have floated researchers at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford as potential partners.

The skeptics

Coastal scientists who reviewed the concept for KQED agreed that an offshore reef could in principle slow waves and help sand accumulate, but cautioned against treating it as a stand-alone fix. The concern: piecemeal projects that address one section of shoreline without a whole-coast strategy can shift erosion rather than stop it.

The gathering spot it lost

The group named the proposal after Rob Caughlan — the founding president of the Surfrider Foundation, who died in January — because Caughlan was the intellectual engine of the planning sessions. Those sessions happened, for years, over coffee at the Chit Chat Cafe on the Pacifica Municipal Pier. When the pier cracked this month, the cafe was demolished. The crisis the group had been meeting to solve ate the place where they had been meeting to solve it.

George Domurat, a long-time Pacifica resident, surfer, and San Mateo County Harbor District commissioner, told KQED that Caughlan "asked the really good questions that would then spin us up in terms of exchanging ideas."

Battalio's read on the city's alternatives is blunter: "Just building walls is not working."