The coastal beatings will continue until morale improves. Following weeks of heavy waves and flooding up and down the Southern California Coast, Huntington beach was forced to declare a local emergency and shut down city streets due to high tides.
The king tides began inundating the area earlier this week. The result was a scene that at times resembled Waterworld more than Surf City, U.S.A. Rising waters have breached sandbags and berms and damaged over 100 properties, as ABC 7 reports.
The city of Huntington declared a local emergency and mounted a multi-pronged response. “We have our crews and our swift water teams out in the different neighborhoods just making sure, seeing if there’s any assistance that they need,” Huntington Beach Fire Chief Eric McCoy told ABC. Water levels also prompted closures of city streets and a section of the Pacific Coast Highway.
As he has been throughout the recent flooding, skimboarder Blair Conklin was on the scene. “Yesterday was the peak of these king tides, and today was about an inch or two less, but still some insanely bad flooding,” he recounted in a recent video. “There’s a lot of low-lying areas there where the bay was just coming up over people’s yards and into the street. And PCH was completely covered in water.”
The water levels have been exacerbated by a confluence of factors. An ongoing super El Niño warmed the ocean and elevated the volume of seawater. Those shifting ocean temperatures also led to kelvin waves, long subsurface waves that can raise water levels. An abundance of hurricane swell has also added to the chaos of the king tides.
