Rachel's Rain Reaches L.A. as Flash Flood Warnings Go Up in SoCal

Coastal flood warnings covered Long Beach and Malibu until 3 p.m., and the Long Beach Marathon rerouted 1.5 miles off the beach.

Long Beach Marathon runners were routed off the beachfront path before mile 8 Sunday, a detour around a shoreline forecasters expected to flood, ABC7 reported.

The rain came too. Moisture from Post-Tropical Cyclone Rachel reached Los Angeles on Sunday morning, and the National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings for parts of Southern California, Newsweek reported. Thursday's forecast, that Rachel's path "now reaches Southern California, with rain by Sunday," turned out right. On L.A.'s coast, though, what forecasters feared most was the ocean.

Rachel itself tracked well south of Los Angeles County, and a low-pressure system pulled its moisture north as bands of rain, ABC7 forecasters said. The weather service expected the heaviest rain in San Diego County and the mountains and deserts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, with mountain downpours reaching up to an inch an hour, according to Newsweek.

Along the shore, the weather service's coastal flood warnings for Los Angeles and Orange county beaches ran through 3 p.m. Sunday. The worst was expected in the morning, when big waves, strong wind and high tide would all hit at once. Forecasters named south-facing beaches in Long Beach and Malibu as the likeliest to see damaging flooding, ABC7 reported.

In Long Beach, the sky was the smaller worry. City officials said Saturday that they expected rain totals to stay mostly under half an inch, along with high winds and very high tides. The waves had already done real damage: eight homes on the peninsula were marked unsafe after Rachel's remnants broke up the boardwalk and sent water over the seawall, ABC7 reported.

That's the water the marathon steered around. Miles 6 through 10 had been laid out a few feet from the Pacific. On Saturday, organizers said runners would turn inland before mile 8 and pick the course back up around mile 9. They called it a "precautionary course adjustment."

The race was going ahead whatever the weather, and it drew a record marathon field of 7,500, race publicist Dan Cruz told City News Service. Another 16,500 entered the half-marathon. The marathon field included Kenny Williams, the one runner who's finished all 41 earlier Long Beach Marathons. His 42nd came with a detour.

The coastal warning was due to expire at 3 p.m. Sunday. The rain wasn't done: ABC7's forecast kept showers in the picture Monday and into Tuesday, with sunshine not due back until midweek.

Source: ktla.com.

Source: abc7.com, retrieved October 11, 2026. Other sources: newsweek.com, abc7.com (2).