JOSH AYERS/MUSTANG DAILY
Compared to others in the county, the Cal Poly Pier is a monster.
A good monster though. One that has facilitated the marine experience for Cal Poly students and recently other regional schools as well as marine-related industry.
“The pier is administered through the College of Science and Math but it’s really a campus-wide resource and even bigger,” said pier facility manager Tom Moylan.
This pier dwarfs all others on the Central Coast. Its one-kilometer length – about 3,280 feet – boasts secure and private access, high-bandwidth Internet capabilities and electricity, which has played in an important part in the university’s joint-use arrangements.
“The industry connections are usually in the marine related areas or marine engineering and they’re looking for places to beta test instrumentation,” Moylan said.
Institutions such as the Monterey Bay Research Center currently utilize the pier for marine projects. In addition, the pier is used for research for the Navy, the National Oceananic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA.
Moylan said that the university allows private companies to use the pier facility (Center for Coastal Marine Sciences), which helps expose students to the industry side of the marine field.
“They can come here and put an instrument in the water, plug it in, hard wire it back the pier and then monitor it from wherever they’re at,” Moylan said.
WET Labs, a company based in Philomath, Ore. specializes in ocean equipment designed to monitor sea life such as plankton. WET Labs was able to test equipment on the Cal Poly pier while monitoring results in Oregon.
Joint-use projects like this encourage partnerships with the university and allow equipment sharing in addition to potential donations and possible student internships with the companies, Moylan said.
“With those partnerships, we involve students so the students get to see another angle of marine science,” Moylan said. “On the industry side, they get to see what it’s like for other career options, not just academia.”
The pier sees about 1,500 students a year and is open to the public two times a year according to Moylan.
Throughout the regular school year, the heaviest use of the pier is during the middle of quarters, Moylan said. The summers have also been picking up since Cuesta College has secured joint use of the pier for its biology classes.
“It’s really year-round with some lulls during the breaks,” Moylan said. “That gives me a chance to catch up on some maintenance things.”
Students are also big beneficiaries from the pier.
It is home to a live laboratory that is used for a variety of projects ranging from biological sciences to manufacturing engineering students.
The lab features access to raw and filtered seawater that comes from directly underneath the pier. Two large industrial pumps drive seawater upward from the north side of the pier and some of the water is filtered through four large cylinders filled with sand.
One project last Friday employed the filtered water resource to monitor the effects of a particular type of parasite on sand crabs.
Across the lab, four trays of a composite material were submerged in seawater to observe its corrosive effects.
Dov Rohan, a Cal Poly graduate, was hired by Cal Poly physics professor Thomas Bensky to work on a project using the Cal Poly pier.
“I graduated in 2006 and for my senior project, was the beginning design of this project,” Rohan said. “I graduated, left for a year or so and came back and the professor I worked with offered me a job just working on the grant money doing the research.”
The project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is attempting to create a device to shine a blue laser through the water to excite phytoplankton, causing them to fluoresce.
A camera records the quantity of the phytoplankton all the way to the ocean floor.
The unique part of this is that the device can make measurements for different depths without having to go to those depths to take the measurements.
“We work here and on campus – in the boat house that’s where we did all the preliminary testing so we don’t have to be out in the elements,” Rohan said. “As soon as we figured it all out, we brought it out here and we’re testing right now.”
Rohan works on the project 40 hours a week and was also involved in the conceptual design of the project three years ago when he was completing his senior project.
“It’s been three years since we initially got the grant money for this project and in the last three days it’s seen its first kind of maiden voyage in the ocean actually, picking up data that is useable,” he said.
Rohan said that he is still ironing out some technical aspects but said that the project is progressing well.
“With all research it’s slow and tedious and sometimes annoying because it doesn’t work the way you expect it to, but that’s the fun beauty of it too; just being able to work through the problem and get the instruments to do what you want it to,” he said.
While Bensky and Rohan’s research represent some of the more complex experiments, the pier’s location makes it a prime tool to monitor weather and ocean patters such as swells and current directions with its permanent equipments.
The Meteorological Station (MET) is positioned on top of one of the buildings on the platform and takes real-time atmospheric readings for patterns such as rainfall, wind, humidity, visibility and more.
Another device, the profiler, which is located on the southern side of the pier, is also constantly collecting data. The device is automated and lowers itself into the ocean every 30 minutes to measure water temperature, plankton density and water salinity. “This is a state-wide program and Cal Poly is heading up the area for the Central Coast,” Moylan said.
The results are instantly updated on the pier’s Web site (http://www.marine.calpoly.edu) along with images and information about current projects.
The Pier was constructed in 1984, after the El Nino of 1983 completely demolished the previous pier. Its construction cost more than $27 million and nearly 10 million barrels of crude oil were pumped through it from the mid 1980s to the 1990s.
Unocal donated the pier to the university in 2001.
“I don’t think that this day in age you could even get the permits to do it,” Moylan said of constructing a pier to the size and capability of Cal Poly’s. “Then to build it, you’re probably talking about $50 to 100 million.”