SOUNDING OFF:

Twenty years ago today, Southern California had a very bad Sunday.

On Aug. 31, 1986, a group of hooligans egged on by hundreds of other youths went berserk at the O.P. Pro Surfing Championships at the Huntington Beach pier. When the smoke cleared, two police cars, a lifeguard jeep and several other vehicles were smoldering wrecks. Some 40 people were injured, many of them law-enforcement officers hit by beer bottles and other projectiles.

The burning vehicles sent black smoke clouds over the city. The riot would have led national news broadcasts if a single-engine Piper hadn’t plowed into an Aeromexico DC-9 over Cerritos the same day, killing 67 passengers and 15 people on the ground.

Detectives later arrested more than 35 rioters — most identified from video and still images. (Almost all had out-of-town addresses.)

For years, charred and discolored concrete marked the spots where police and lifeguard vehicles burned that day.

Damage could have been much worse, however. At the height of the riot, Marine Safety Captain Bill Richardson grabbed a 9mm Ruger used by lifeguards for training and faced down the intruders, who were moving to loot the building.

Richardson, who still lives in Huntington Beach, recalled the incident last week.

“The guys I was facing down were nuts; you could see they were absolutely crazed,” he said. “ … I yelled at them to stop. Two guys started walking toward me — looking me straight in the eye — they thought I was faking it with the gun. So I pointed it at the ceiling and fired a round. When they heard that, they turned and ran like it was a 50-yard dash.”

The bullet remained in the ceiling of the old Vincent G. Morehouse Lifeguard Headquarters until it was demolished around 2000.

The riot would become a part of local lore, prompting a bigger police presence at other surfing events. Many, like myself, who watched the events on the beach that day, thought the riot was a freak event, something that could never have happened before and would be unlikely to ever happen again.

But a glance at old newspapers proves that assumption wrong. The 1986 riot, in fact, was an eerily similar repeat of events that had happened at least twice before.

On April 13, 1958, police battled rioters “for more than an hour” after police were targeted with “cans, bottles and sacks of sand” when they arrested an intoxicated suspect. Then in April 1969, another perfect Sunday went bad when youths trashed five police cars after a teenager was arrested, apparently for possession of marijuana. High spirits turned ugly as “the crowd attacked (police) with fists, bottles and sticks.”

More recently, Fourth of July celebrations of the mid-1990s reminded residents that Huntington Beach has a way of turning summer fun into fire, property damage and drunks in handcuffs.

Following the 1986 melee, Huntington Beach Police Lt. Jack Reinholtz made an observation that gives pause for thought.

“Yesterday was totally without reason,” Reinholtz told the L.A. Times. “I don’t know why other peoples’ sand doesn’t attract trouble. But there’s some attraction to our city, and we get it.”

Huntington Beach is Surf City, and more than 8 million visitors come here each year to soak up that image. Along with the tourists come dollars, but the out-of-towners also take millions away in the form of big bills for police service.

That’s the cost of peace in the city, and we all pay the bill.