A guided-missile destroyer pulled up alongside the pier at the Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach on Tuesday, April 9, marking new opportunities for the base.
Primary construction recently finished to open the new pier that will allow multiple ships, and larger ships, to dock for loading up munitions supplies. The Seal Beach station is the primary munitions storage and maintenance installation for the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.
“This new expanded pier facility provides destroyers and other fleet assets with expanded logistical capacity to arm faster and more efficiently,” said the base’s commanding officer, Capt. Jessica O’Brien, in a statement, calling the new facility “vital for warfighting readiness.”
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The pier replaces an older wharf built in 1954, which could only handle one destroyer-sized ship at a time. This larger pier “will allow dual ship operations, along with the ability to support much larger vessels such as general purpose amphibious assault ships nearly three football fields long,” officials said in an announcement of the first ship to visit, the USS Paul Hamilton.
“We should see an increase in the volume of ships coming in, and we will also see an improved flexibility to support the fleet,” said Roosevelt Simmons, West Coast executive director of Navy Munitions Command Pacific.
Officials said there are a few remaining bits of work to complete, but all construction should be finished by the summer.
The $155 million project started in 2019; first completed was a new boating channel that directed civilians traveling past the base on their way to and from the Huntington Harbor further away from the Navy operations. That channel, dug out of an unused section of Anaheim Bay, opened in 2021.
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