Backwash Wall Towers Over Laguna Beach as Rachel Swell Shuts Aliso Lot and Floods Low Streets
Friday brought a towering backwash wall, a closed parking lot at Aliso Beach and traffic shutdowns near downtown, and forecasters say Sunday could be worse.
Rachel's swell keeps getting stronger. New footage from Orange County shows what appears to be a roughly 25-foot wall of backwash exploding at the shoreline in Laguna Beach, as incoming waves collide with returning water on a Pacific already running abnormally high, Surfer.com reported Saturday.
"I've never seen anything like this ever," videographer Chris Monroe, known as BEEFS T.V., says in the footage. "The beach is gone. This parking lot is literally like a beach... it's going to PCH!"
The National Weather Service is not forecasting 25-foot breaking surf. Its latest warning calls for 5-to-7-foot surf with local sets to 9 feet on Sunday. But those waves arrive on top of high tides exceeding seven feet and unusually high background sea levels, producing extreme runup, flooding, and erosion, according to Surfer.com's report.
On the ground Friday, Laguna Beach authorities shut down traffic near Broadway Street and South Coast Highway as high tides pushed waves into a channel and flooded the low-lying area, according to local reporting. The city closed the Aliso Beach parking lot after waves proved strong enough to pick up cement benches and trash cans and carry them into the parking area. South Laguna Beach was closed off to pedestrians as well, City Manager Dave Kiff said.
Pictures posted on the Laguna Beach Police Department's social media showed water flowing beneath the boardwalk at Main Beach, where public works crews used heavy equipment to move sand ahead of the next high tide.
"Everybody's out there trying to make sure we're ready for the next high tide," Kiff said, adding that fire, marine safety, police and public works personnel were all responding to the flooding. "The wave swell is fairly consistent. It's actually larger than we expected ... We got to watch the high-tide periods, especially."
Waves arrived about two feet higher than expected on Thursday, with surf around five feet, Marine Safety Chief Kai Bond said earlier in the week. "It's really hard to tell what's what at this point, the specific cause of it," Bond said. "We have three things going: surf a little larger than normal, high tides, and then potentially the effects of the Kelvin wave."
A portion of Aliso Beach and its parking lot remain closed, as do the Agate Street stairs after a recent rockslide raised concerns about the structure's stability. Officials are also monitoring Pearl Street beach and the area near Victoria Beach. "There's just a bunch of areas we're continuing to monitor; none of them have seen significant damage," Bond said.
Rachel itself was accelerating northeast early Saturday. The National Hurricane Center placed the tropical storm about 640 miles south-southwest of San Diego, packing 60-mph winds and moving northeast at 22 mph, Surfer.com reported. Forecasters warn Sunday could be worse: the Weather Service warns that "significant coastal flooding and erosion is likely," and Huntington Beach-based forecasting site Surfline says waves could reach 8 to 10 feet at some Orange County beaches on Sunday.
Kiff warned the city may be at the start of an extended stretch of ocean battering. "This could be the first of 16 days of [these ocean conditions], so there is potential for more damage," he said.
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