El Niño has been all over the news recently and will likely stay that way for the next few months, with TV weather-guessers blathering about potential devastation.
Some may get tired of hearing about it and want to dismiss it as more hype because they’ve heard it before and it amounted to a big fat nothingburger.
But for those of us who’ve been around these parts for more than a few minutes, we remember the El Niño of 1997-1998, which is what this year’s pattern more closely resembles, and let me tell you, that was serious business.
Let’s start in the south: Seaside Beach parking lot. The big Seaside Beach parking lot had been an unimproved dirt lot for decades, and the locals loved it. Then, in about 1996 or so, the state hired an architect out of Sacramento, where they have the Sacramento River but not an ocean with tides and stuff, and they designed and built a fancy asphalt parking lot with restrooms near the west edge. They were very proud.
In short order, the 1997-1998 El Niño brought a series of storms, one after another, with strong winds, numerous heavy rainstorms, very high tides, and very large swells.
What happens is that when the first big waves come, they strip the beaches of sand, and what’s left underneath is the rocks, which are called “cobble.” Then, when the next set of storms arrives, there’s no sandy beach to help hold back the wave action, and the ocean not only hurls the cobble onto the parking lots, but also undermines and erodes beneath.
At Seaside, this caused part of the new parking lot, including those pretty new bathrooms, to collapse, rendering it unsafe and unusable. The state ended up putting “temporary” fencing around the debacle, which stayed there until about 2003, when the city of Encinitas hired a proper beach-knowledgeable firm to design and build it right. That’s what is there now.
Moving north to Cardiff State Beach parking lot, aka “The Reef,” that much smaller parking lot suffered a similar fate, and in fact, during that same 1997-1998 storm season, the “cobble” not only covered much of the parking lot, but at times it reportedly had rocks as much as a foot deep, rendering it closed for many days.
More importantly, our vital north-south transportation system was affected because Coast Highway 101 was closed many days due to the cobble covering it as well!
In downtown Encinitas, the roads and alleyways were often flooded, and many of the alleys, still dirt and rutted, developed deep ponding that could last for days, even after the storms passed.
Leucadia’s tall bluffs took a real beating from the cobble being hurled like shotgun blasts into the bluff faces at high tides, and additional bluff erosion and weakening was the unfortunate but natural outcome.
Additionally, Leucadia, because of its geography, experienced severe flooding along and west of Highway 101. The city has implemented numerous drainage projects to try to alleviate the flooding issue, and there has been some improvement since 1997, but nobody can contend with a straight face that the issue is solved.
Also of concern, the railroad corridor and Highway 101 between LaCosta Ave and Leucadia Boulevard have been a mess for what seems like ten years now, so let’s hope the city can get this buttoned up before any real storms materialize.
The El Niño storms weren’t strictly a coastal issue. Further inland, we had serious flooding and road closures at the La Bajada Dip as well as at EL Camino Real and Leucadia Blvd. To contend with.
I guess what I want to convey is that this really looks more like 1997-1998 than 2005, but Encinitas is in a better position to weather the storms than we were. We have had beach sand replenishment projects and drainage improvement projects, and our first responders are now better equipped and better trained than they were then.
But we all need to do what we can to get ready, too. Clean out the rain gutters, trim back tree branches that could damage your roof in high winds, and, if you live in a low-lying area, have sandbags or other protective systems ready to deploy if needed.
And if you’re driving in a storm, DO NOT drive around any “road closed” or “Flooded” signs. Let’s all stay safe.
Jerome Stocks is a former mayor and city councilman of Encinitas. Read more of his commentaries here.
