By Sam Whiting : sfchronicle – excerpt
From her protected pier inside Gashouse Cove, San Francisco fuel dock operator Chrissy Kaplan can look 300 yards out to the breakwater and see her future. She doesn’t want to be there.
Kaplan is being permanently relocated from her location across from the Marina Safeway to make way for a basin remediation project that will require removal of her dock and up to 185 boat slips.
The joint project by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department will create a new city park that includes the 12 acres of water and excludes both power boats and the fuel dock. Remediation is scheduled to begin in 2026 and necessitates moving Gashouse Cove Marina Inc., which Kaplan has operated for 50 years, out of the East Harbor and down past Marina Green to a newly constructed West Harbor near the St. Francis Yacht Club.
But it isn’t the added wind or rougher water that will make it difficult to fuel boats bobbing in the tide that bothers her — Kaplan doesn’t see any way to relocate her 22,000-gallon fuel container, which is buried in two fiberglass tanks in a concrete vault beneath the parking lot outside the gate of the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.
“There is no space to my knowledge that is secure enough to accommodate tanks in the West Harbor,” said Kaplan, who is 69 and took over the fuel concession when she was 19 and just out of Piedmont High School…
“It will be a calamity,” she said. “Everything west of our current location is on unstable ground.”… (more)