Rachel’s waves battered Southern California before the storm could arrive
Rachel’s waves battered Southern California before the storm could arrive
Friday’s damage came before Tropical Storm Rachel itself reached the region. With the system still roughly 800 miles southwest of San Diego, powerful swell and unusually high tides pushed seawater across Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula, flooding an estimated 15 to 20 blocks and reaching homes several blocks inland.
Newport Beach declared a local emergency as crews pumped streets and rebuilt sand barriers. City manager Seimone Jurjis said the immediate mission was to “reinforce as many vulnerable locations as possible before the next high tide.” The surge also exposed how months of erosion had narrowed the buffer between homes and the ocean.
Farther north, the Long Beach Peninsula absorbed the harsher structural blow. Waves breached protective barriers, ripped apart stretches of boardwalk and left buildings unsafe to enter. By Saturday night, Mayor Rex Richardson said eight structures had been red-tagged and one yellow-tagged; some peninsula residents were ordered to evacuate through Tuesday.
As Rachel moved toward northern Baja California on Saturday, forecasters shifted their concern from wind to water. Meteorologist Adam Roser warned that the system would arrive “late tonight and tomorrow,” with elevated tides, rain and surf threatening major coastal flooding. Long Beach began adding as much as 100,000 cubic yards of sand to create a larger buffer, while officials planned a much larger beach-widening project for later in the month.
By Sunday, Rachel had made landfall as a post-tropical system. Flooding and erosion spread across coastal communities in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, but the tides fell short of the worst forecasts. That spared the coast a broader catastrophe, not the homes already left teetering above an eroded shoreline.
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