12 



SERVICE RECORDS SECTION 



In following out the program suggested in last year's report, ef- 

 forts in the Service Records work during the present year have been 

 directed toward three objectives: (1) to inspect for present condition 

 the now existing structures reported on last year, and thus bring up to 

 date their service record; (2) to uncover more of the great volume of 

 service record material which still lay buried in the files of the com- 

 panies and institutions having waterfront interests in San Francisco 

 Bay; (3) to develop an adequate but practical outline of what a ser- 

 vice record should include, for recommendation to the cooperators in 

 the Marine Piling Survey and any others in the San Francisco Bay re_ 

 gion who should approve the idea, so that future service records in 

 this region may be both more adequate and more consistent and uni- 

 form in the data recorded than they have been in the past. 



One of the gratifying results of the work of the San Francisco 

 Bay Marine Piling Committee and its report, as submitted to this As- 

 sociation last year, has been the stimulation of the California Board of 

 State Harbor Commissioners, who control the entire waterfront of the 

 city of San Francisco, to undertake and complete during the year 

 under present report a detailed inspection of all the piling on this 

 waterfront, comprising something like 140 acres of piers and wharves. 

 In addition to inspection of existing structures, the files and records 

 of the Board were reviewed for information bearing on the construc- 

 tion and history of the structures which preceded them; all of which 

 information has been summarized in a report prepared for the use of 

 both the Commission and the Committee. This report is accompanied 

 by the tabulated statement of service, completed to date by the inspec- 

 tions of the present year. The report necessarily repeats m some 

 cases information brought out in the report of this Committee last 

 year; but in its entirety the report is so valuable, and it is so diffi- 

 cult to dissect it without doing violence to it, that it is introduced ver- 

 batim as a part of the present report. There is no other organization 

 in this region the continuity of whose record is equal to that of the 

 Board of State Harbor Commissioners, their record going back in 

 some cases a little over forty years. 



From the Harbor Commission report it can clearly be seen, as was 

 not realized last year from the more limited material then available, 

 that acute engineering, and even public, interest in better protection of 

 piling structures against marine borers in this region, has occurred 

 in nearly regular cycles of close to ten years each. The anxiety in 

 each case was caused by the failure of some scheme or schemes which 

 had been evolved, or to which faith had been pinned, as at last the per- 

 fect protection, at the preceding "awakening." And each wave evolved 

 one or more new processes, which were likewise acclaimed, in spite 

 of previous experience. 



