Yet most pier-deaths are slower.
The builders eschewed the wooden piles that supported most piers, and instead used three caissons, enormous concrete boxes.
Most piers along this coast have undergone structural changes caused by weather, economics, even politics, and Newport is no exception.
Most piers in Southern California started life as wharves where steamers could tie up, before the coastal shipping lines were superseded by railroads and highways.
If piers are your thing, then visit East Anglia, which has the greatest density of them still in existence; the most piers have been lost in the south-east, a number that tragically increased this week with the fire at Eastbourne.
It's why people, particularly the young, visit most piers – for a day of innocent amusement, something out of the ordinary and away from their usual surroundings; you are, after all, "offshore"!
Like most piers it was chopped in half in the second world war, in the paranoid conviction that invading Germans would make use of them, storming past the candyfloss stalls and the swing boats to conquer Britain.
Next came the car, but most piers weren't built to accommodate the auto.
After a long campaign by local people to raise funds for restoration (supported by Sir John Betjeman, who described Clevedon as "the most beautiful pier in England"), the pier eventually reopened.
Its experts concluded that the tatters of the most beautiful pier in Britain, the first to win Grade I listing, are "beyond rescue".
If not the longest, then the world's most futuristic pier must surely be the 300-metre long example Foster and Partners have designed for Rimini on Italy's Adriatic coast.
