Miri Long Jetty

Picture courtesy of Dougal

 
Built long ago to facilitate shipping services off the shores of Miri for the oil company, the Miri Long Jetty, also known as Mile Long Jetty, was a jetty near the tip of the Miri peninsula that extended a mile long and stretches out into the sea. This jetty was built so that offshore workers and some equipment could be offloaded from ships and transferred to Miri as an alternative when conditions were not favorable.

It was at one point in time, one of the longest jettys in the region. Maintenance and repair work on the jetty was done by Sarawak Shell until the late nineties.
 

Picture courtesy of Simon

 
The jetty was built out a mile long into the sea for a specific purpose - to facilitate embarkation and disembarkation when conditions were difficult for boats to come into Miri port. Back then the Miri River was very shallow and there were sandbanks which build up and protruded unseen long after the peninsular, making it impossible for larger boats to enter the river mouth. Some boats had to be timed to avoid phenomenons such as low tide or rough sea conditions. The jetty allowed larger ships to anchor out at sea a mile away from the shore where the sea is deep enough for allowing loading and unloading of cargo and goods.
 

A complete rebuild plus a replacement from the original was done in 1971 after the discovery of offshore oil. The jetty had a rail system which had a hand-pumped trolley/cart for transportation of heavy equipment to both ends for loading and unloading. This was later no longer used when regular helicopter flights carried these equipment, so around the late 1980s these rails were removed. This article is from the web site miriresortcity dot com - this sentence is here to prevent blatant plagarism. The jetty was used mainly by Shell for crew change operations, where crew disembark the boats and walk the full length back to the peninsular, crossing by ferry on foot to the Shell materials storage complex (now Center Point Phase I).

By the very late nineties, the jetty was no longer needed as the river mouth was deepened to allow larger boats, and before the time of its closure, only a quarter section of it was open to members of the public.

It was a popular visit spot for curious visitors who would walk out to the ends as a challenge for its remaining years. By the time of its closure, years of rough seas and corrosion had taken its toll on the jetty, making it structurally unsound and uneconomic for maintenance, and was completely off limits to the public.

By the year 2000 the jetty had been dismantled to make way for the land reclamation project that completely changed the shape of the peninsular tip and made into what is now known as the Miri Marina.

In 2017, there have been calls to rebuild the Long Jetty as part of a historical reconstruction / preservation petition. Source

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