BIG HONKIN’ FREAKING WAVE Almost At California Coastline, Joining El Niño, Having Beach Party

Six to twelve inches is a lot bigger than I was originally led to believe!

Oh, God, there goes my house! Photo by Matthew Hume on Unsplash

Hello again, it’s time for your daily dose of hope and cheer from me, Sunshine Smiley Pancakes! Today I will once again discuss the MASSIVE PLANETARY-SCALE FUCKING WAVE HEADING STRAIGHT FOR SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA OH MY GOD.

Sorry everyone, hope and cheer has been canceled due to inclement weather and imminent flooding, so I will only be operating today from venom and spite.

Climate scientist Daniel Swain knows what’s up. He discusses what’s going on in his blog, Weather West. West Coasters are in for more heat and humidity, as well as south-facing coasts and bluffs about to get absolutely hammered for an uncertain amount of time.

Some of our climate folks are now saying it’s going to be the strongest in a millennium! It’s an El Niñoso. El Panzón.

Another way to give us money!

I’ve never seen anything quite like this in my life. And on top of El Panzón, we have Kelvin flooding to contend with probably starting in a day or two!

Tides are already running a foot or more above average thanks to the extreme marine heatwave, and additional sea level elevation may begin soon as the largest coastally-trapped Kelvin wave of the El Niño-generated sequence thus far arrives in October. As a result, significant coastal erosion and local bluff collapses, plus shoreline inundation, are once again likely (perhaps comparable to, or slightly less severe than, that associated with Hurricane Marie earlier this year). Unfortunately, major coastal erosion and flooding concerns will persist and perhaps even worsen in the coming weeks as El Niño continues to intensify and as winter storm season approaches — so this is unlikely to be the last time such problems emerge this year.

As I said in a previous rant on this topic, a coastally trapped Kelvin wave is a sort of underwater wave that pushes up sea levels as it sloshes around in the Pacific, made worse by, you guessed it, climate change. It will push our local sea levels up by 6 to 12 inches — temporarily, but for how long I don’t know — and that’s going to come alongside rains and winds and King Tides and who knows what else is coming.

It’s already fucking up Baja California along with Hurricane Polo and heading stateside, where it’s going to cause all sorts of problems that I sincerely hope we have the infrastructure to deal with, because it’s not going to be the last one. It may not even be the last one this year!

I know I just said that I have never seen anything quite like this in my life. That’s sort of a lie. In fact, although I was a 20-year-old who didn’t know shit at the time, the very first national story I covered was a climate story. I thought it was just a one-off!

I didn’t know the broader context of it yet, but Daniel Swain mentions it in this story about the oncoming coastal flooding and massive El Niño here:

Swain pointed to the winter of 1997-1998, which exhibited similar hazards. Heavy storms caused massive coastal erosion, as enormous landslides ruptured and buried highways, and huge waves swept into harbors across Santa Cruz and the San Francisco Bay Area. Levees failed north of Sacramento and seawalls were overwhelmed, while relentless rains tore into thousands of homes and businesses. Twenty-one of California’s 58 counties were declared disaster areas.

And that, my friends, is right where my career began.

But before I get to that, I need to direct your attention to just some of the damage done by the 1997-1998 El Niño, because it was bad enough, but this one is bigger. Please get as prepared as you can, because shit is gonna get wild and woolly out there.

In Laguna Beach, two hillsides gave way, sending a river of mud and water through homes and cars. Two men were killed and at least two others injured, and three hundred homes were damaged, 18 of them seriously. […] In San Diego County, 200 people were evacuated from three mobile home parks in Oceanside, and portions of Camp Pendleton were flooded, due to the raging Loma Alta Creek. Numerous sink holes developed. One near the I-15 and Balboa Avenue in San Diego, measured 550 feet long, 35 feet wide, and 65 feet deep. […]

The persistent wet weather damaged the strawberry crop, assorted winter vegetables, citrus and avocado groves, and hurt the flower industry in San Diego County, but losses to dairymen in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties was staggering. Thousands of cows succumbed to the weather. Some drowned, others died of exhaustion and fatigue from struggling through 3 to 4 feet of mud, and many lost calves. Damage estimates to residences, businesses, property, infrastructure, agriculture, and the cost of emergency services, and for clean-up for all four counties exceeded $100 million.

Pay attention to that part I bolded, because that was my first reported story.

For years, I told this story to classes and auditoriums when I used to get invited to speaking engagements, before 2020 and everything that came after it finally broke my personality and made me unable to give speeches any more without bounding into the audience to grab random people by the lapels and screaming into their face to just fucking listen already! You only need to do that once or twice before they stop inviting you back!

So here’s my story about my very first report, which is no longer anywhere as cute as it once was. What it functions as now is a warning.

The year was 1998, I was 20, I had recently gotten my first radio job a year or so before. I was kind of a dipshit who had dropped out of high school and community college over the course of the previous couple of years and couldn’t figure out what to do with my life.

So I stopped by this local radio station and applied for a laugh, because I come from a media family. To my utter shock, they hired me. To my further shock, I was actually good at it. Everything that made me unhireable everywhere else made me great at being on the air! I was in love for the first time in my life, and so I did what generations of radio people have done before me: I just hung around at the radio station until someone told me to go home. Sometimes no one would tell me to and I would hang around all night!

It was one such night, February 23, 1998, that I was kicking back in the newsroom pretending the reason I didn’t want to go home was because it was raining heavily (this is called foreshadowing!) and I was hanging out with the overnight crew, because it was the ‘90s and radio still had enough of a budget to have an overnight crew.

We were hanging around shooting the shit and suddenly the police scanners we always had on started to crackle. The overnight guy listened for a moment and said, “Holy shit. They’re saying part of the freeway just collapsed one exit down from us. Brooke, can you go check it out?”

I could. I was, in fact, perfectly thrilled to have an actual reason to be hanging at my workplace at one in the morning. So they kitted me out with a microphone and a recorder, instructed me to interview anyone I could, and sent me on my way.

When I got to the place, there was a single fire engine and a couple of people standing around in the pouring rain looking down at something. I got out of my car and ran up to them with my microphone, which my coworkers had thoughtfully covered up for me with plastic bags.

Well, what we were all looking at was a gigantic fucking hole. It was perhaps 25 feet deep, I couldn’t tell how long it was, and there was a car floating in water at the bottom of it. I gaped at it for a moment and then this guy came up to me yelling that it was his car and he was going to work when the freeway started breaking up in front of him and he had gotten out just in time. The poor guy was absolutely wild-eyed, and who could blame him?

As I was talking to him (no one was injured in this one, by the way) more firefighters rolled up to where we were and started talking about winches and shit, so I stepped back to the lip of the hole and looked down again before they shooed me off to file my story. I was very excited.

Then I heard a very loud rumbling noise. “Do you hear thunder?” I started to ask the firefighters, and then realized it was coming from beneath our feet. We all went whoa whoa whoa, and backed up just in time to see the ground we had been standing on a second before crumble into the now much larger hole! Then we were all wild-eyed, just like the poor guy whose car was still in there.

It turns out that there had been some infrastructure issues there, that they were putting off repairs that had needed to be made for some time, and it just gave way under relentless rain. It was pure luck that it happened at midnight on a Monday or whatever, as opposed to a Friday afternoon when there would have been hundreds of cars in that exact area. Instead, it just became a months-long traffic nightmare.

The biggest difference this time around, besides the scale of this gigantic climate event, is that we should not expect much in the way of federal aid, given that we are in a pretty fraught political situation right now.

That means we, California, should probably operate as if we are on our own and not expecting much in the way of outside help, so it might be good to start a-preppin’!

Oh, and if you want to see a photo of that giant fucking sinkhole, it’s right here in a list of photos called “The Most Terrifying Sinkhole Photos You’ve Ever Seen.”

I remember standing there in the pouring rain dancing back from the rim of that massive freeway hole and thinking, This is what I want to do with the rest of my life. And that, for years, was the story I told to all sorts of burgeoning and established journalists, as a cute way to illustrate my love for doing journalisms.

But life has a funny way of turning that shit around, because I take it back! I didn’t mean like this! I meant I wanted to cover, like, exciting stuff, where people didn’t get hurt, and human ingenuity saved the day. But I didn’t specify that when I made my wish to the universe, so it’s all my fault. The best I can offer now is terrifying, horrible warnings.

Sorry.