For more than 20 years, Mussel Rock, a steep stretch of oceanfront land in northern San Mateo County with breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean and the Farallon Islands, was a garbage dump.
Two communities, Pacifica and Daly City, threw away thousands of tons of trash there starting in 1957, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, “I Love Lucy” ruled the airwaves, and environmental laws were few and far between.
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The landfill closed in 1978. The garbage, 100 feet deep in some places, was covered with dirt roughly 4 feet thick. A barrier of boulders was built along part of the beach to slow erosion. The property became a public park where today people hike and fish. The history is fading. But the garbage remains.
Years of crashing waves, landslides and shifting geology have caused some of the long-entombed trash — from old toys to bottles to easily read newspapers from the early 1960s — to emerge from the cliffs and fall onto the beaches below.
Last week, crews worked to repair and extend the rocky barrier, called rip rap. During a walk on the beach, trash was visible in parts of the cliffs, which crumbled easily to the touch. There was a green plastic straw sticking out. An old Brown Derby beer can. A filthy hairbrush. A leather shoe. A plastic six-pack ring. A Chesterfield cigarette box with the slogan: “For full-flavored satisfaction.”
Trash sits along a trail, leaking from the old landfill that operated from 1957 to 1978 at Mussel Rock Beach in Daly City, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025. The old coastal trash dump has been leaking trash into the ocean and onto the beach. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
“Imagine what’s under there,” said naturalist Julie Walters, pointing up the face of the unstable cliff. “It’s like the tip of an iceberg.”
Walters, who works with the non-profit Pacific Beach Coalition, said she’s not sure what the best solution is. But she said it shows decisions we make today can have very long-running consequences.
“Plastic never goes away,” she said.
The California Coastal Commission has issued five emergency permits in the last decade to officials at Daly City, which owns the site, allowing them to pile up rocks and take other modest steps to hold back the ocean. But as sea level rises and the forces of nature take a relentless toll, the commission is growing impatient.
“This is one of the bigger concerns of ours from San Mateo County to the Sonoma Coast,” said Stephanie Rexing, the commission’s North Central District manager. “This is an unprotected landfill — except for a Band-Aid seawall — with erosion, fault lines, active landslides and sea level rise. You’ve got rain washing down on one side and waves rushing up on the other side. It’s a mess.”
In April, the commission ordered Daly City to draft a comprehensive plan by Oct. 2 with options for dealing with the old dump, a location the agency described as “a severe threat to marine resources” which is at “risk of a catastrophic failure” in a landslide, winter storms or an earthquake on the San Andreas fault, which runs nearby.
A report the city commissioned last year by Tetra Tech, an Oakland company, concluded that digging up the entire dump and moving it to Ox Mountain Landfill 23 miles away near Half Moon Bay would take eight years and cost up to $355 million.
Engineers estimate there is 1.4 million cubic yards of garbage buried next to the beach, enough to fill roughly 140,000 dump trucks.
Other options included continuing basic maintenance and temporary fixes on the rock wall, which would cost $350,000 a year, and about $6 million for rock rebuilding every five or six years, to various projects to move some of the trash, with a price tag in the tens of millions of dollars.
Daly City can’t afford a $355 million clean-up, its supporters say. The city’s entire annual budget for police, fire, roads, parks, and all other services is only $150 million. Daly City’s mayor, city manager and public works director did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Other local officials did.
“There has to be a plan. But $355 million? Who pays for that?” said San Mateo County Supervisor David Canepa, a former Daly City mayor whose district includes Mussel Rock. “Daly City is a working-class city. Even if it’s $10 million, that’s a lot. They live on the margins.”
Testing over the years also has found elevated levels of nickel, zinc, copper, lead and ammonia in the groundwater.
Canepa questioned why the landfill was located there. “The way they built it was horrific. They built it right next to the ocean,” he said. “And now we are stuck with it. I’m worried the Coastal Commission is going to stick them with a huge bill.”
Coastal commission officials say they and state water regulators have been working for years to help Daly City. But the commission wants a more focused plan now, one that could potentially be funded with local taxes, state grants, federal money or state bond funds, from measures like Proposition 4, a $10 billion bond California voters passed in November to address climate change issues from forest fires to sea level rise.
Mike Wilson, a coastal commissioner, noted at a July commission meeting that prior generations made environmental decisions that people today have to fix.
“Sometimes we look at this through a lens of ‘How could this possibly happen?’” Wilson said. “Well it happened, a long time ago, and now we’re dealing with it.”
He said, however, the mess is not the fault of today’s Daly City leaders or staff.
“I just want to make sure we aren’t condemning anybody,” he said.
Another commissioner, Ann Notthoff, agreed.
“As a child growing up in San Mateo County in the 50s and 60s, I am probably responsible for some of the waste buried there,” she said. “I would certainly hope I can be part of the solution going forward.”
Other former Bay Area landfills took on new lives. Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View was built in 1985 on a 682-acre closed landfill that took trash from San Francisco. Bedwell Bayfront Park in Menlo Park and Byxbee Park on the Palo Alto Baylands are both former garbage dumps.
“Daly City is already spending a lot of money trying to keep the landfill from sliding into the ocean,” said Jeff Christner, a former Daly City resident who found plastic Army men, old newspapers, bottles and other debris on the beaches there during hikes there with his son, Paxton.
“I don’t know how they are going to fix it,” he said. “But I hope they come up with some type of solution.”
A visitor hikes along a trail on the former landfill that operated from 1957 to 1978 at Mussel Rock Beach in Daly City, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025. The old coastal trash dump has been leaking trash into the ocean and onto the beach. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)