It only took half an hour. High tide floodwaters transformed stretches of dry asphalt along Marin County’s Shoreline Highway just north of San Francisco into two-foot-deep tide pools this Tuesday—coastal hazards that the National Weather Service warns will persist across the Bay Area this month into Halloween.
In a genuinely haunting preview of the havoc that warm expanding water from El Niño’s Kelvin waves is predicted to wreak during the weeks of America’s Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, Northern California is now coping with tidal flooding from San Pablo Bay down to Monterey. San Francisco’s NPR station KQED and other local news affiliates have published drone footage of paddleboarders and kayakers navigating commuter roads beneath Highway 101 in Sausalito, but the scope of the problem has been less cute elsewhere. High tide in the Bay Area this Monday cleared its record for the highest ever recorded in the month of October.
Motorists have found themselves trapped in low-lying coastal neighborhoods. Coastal fire departments are warning that California’s quintessential electric vehicles are at risk of runaway battery fires if saltwater short-circuits their battery packs. And farther down the California coast in Newport Beach, just south of Los Angeles, city officials are now doling out free sandbags in advance of the coming fall and winter surges.
5 million-per-day economic damages, according to a new report by UC Davis landscape ecologist Fraser Shilling.
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