John King, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle March 13, 2011 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Sunday, March 13, 2011
(03-13) 04:00 PDT Crescent City, Del Norte County --
Visit Crescent City and you see Tsunami Plaza, a half-empty shopping center. Tsunami Lanes, a bowling alley. A mural commemorating the 1964 natural disaster that reshaped this small city near the Oregon border.
Now there's another tsunami sight, one far more vivid and stark: the harbor where docks and boats were pummeled to oblivion on Friday, leaving a hole in the already-struggling city's economy as well as its shared culture.
"We're a working harbor, and that's a huge part of how we define ourselves as a community," said Kelly Schellong, a member of the city council who first visited Crescent City as a child in 1978. "This is going to have a trickle-down effect beyond the lost jobs."
State officials on Saturday were still trying to gauge the damage caused by the tsunami, an aquatic echo of the much more ruinous 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on Friday.
Waves also damaged the Santa Cruz harbor, causing an estimated $17 million in damage, but the damage was most pronounced in this city of 4,000 that lays claim to being the state's most active commercial fishing port north of Monterey.
There's no price tag, but at least 17 boats sank as a result of the tsunami, the Coast Guard reported Saturday, and nearly all of the harbor's floating docks were destroyed. A film of gasoline covered the water among the boats that remained in the harbor, many of them visibly damaged. Officials also released the identity of the man swept to sea Friday morning while photographing the tsunami: Dustin Webber, 25, who recently had moved to Klamath from Bend, Ore.
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