Laguna Beach Declared a Sand Emergency. Nobody Has Priced the Fix.

Six oceanfront homes on Ocean Way and Lagunita Drive were yellow-tagged for damaged seawalls; Dana Point red-tagged nine.

Swells from former Hurricane Marie stripped so much sand off Laguna Beach that six oceanfront homes were yellow-tagged and the city declared a local emergency. Laguna Beach issued the declaration on Thursday, September 10, 2026, FOX 11 reported, after city officials found the seawalls beneath houses on Ocean Way and Lagunita Drive compromised.

Those are the people the paperwork is about: a dozen or so households on two streets, waiting on building inspectors who are still checking the walls holding their yards up. The swell began carrying sand away on September 2. Part of the parking lot at Aliso Beach has failed since then, city officials said.

What the declaration actually buys is procedure. It lets the city order structural repair, debris hauling and new sand without the delays of normal contracting, and it gives Laguna Beach a footing to work with other agencies on money for shoreline protection later.

City Manager Dave Kiff said in a statement that most people there have never watched this much sand go at once. “We expect it to come back, but we are not counting on it,” he said, citing a forecast for a very strong El Niño winter.

Dana Point declared its own emergency. Nine homes there were red-tagged and seven yellow-tagged after waves tore out decks and drove one house to partially collapse into the ocean, the outlet reported.

Malibu makes three. The city declared an emergency after a sinkhole opened at a beachfront home owned by the actor Nicolas Cage, and 31 properties were red-tagged and evacuated. As of Friday, September 11, 2026, city officials said the evacuation order and the red tags were still in force.

Orange County has activated its Emergency Operations Center, which pulls county departments and emergency managers into one room to handle damage assessments, mutual aid and resource requests for Dana Point and Laguna Beach as a single regional incident rather than department by department.

Katrina Foley, vice chair of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, called for regional sand replenishment after visiting the damaged stretches. “If we had a deeper beach the wave action wouldn’t be coming up so close to the homes,” she said.

No one has put a number on the repairs. The total funding needed hasn’t been determined, and there’s no estimate for how long the lost sand would take to return on its own.

Closures were still posted as of September 11. They cover Pearl Street Beach, the footpath at Christmas Cove, the south end of Lagunita Beach and the Aliso Beach parking lot, and the city has told residents and visitors to keep out of the posted zones. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is telling swimmers across Southern California to stay clear of the water near storm drains, creeks and river mouths, where runoff drives bacteria levels up.

Source: foxla.com, retrieved September 21, 2026.