Rachel's Waves Wrecked Part of a Long Beach Seawall. Sunday's Tide Is Higher.

Inspectors red-tagged two buildings on Seaside Walk, and forecasters expect a 7.6-foot high tide Sunday morning at San Pedro.

On the Long Beach Peninsula, crews stacked about 1,000 sandbags where Tropical Storm Rachel's waves had destroyed a stretch of the wooden seawall.

The city reported serious damage to roughly 30 feet of the Peninsula bulkhead, between 65th and 66th Place, FOX 11 reported Friday. A few steps away, along the 6400 and 6500 blocks of Seaside Walk, inspectors put preliminary red tags on two buildings and a yellow tag on a third.

And the water hasn't peaked. The National Weather Service's coastal flood advisory runs through 2 p.m. Tuesday, and forecasters expect the biggest risk around Sunday.

A red tag means nobody goes inside. A yellow tag lets owners in to grab their things, but they can't stay until the building is judged structurally safe. Count a building that was yellow-tagged after Hurricane Marie, and four now count as damaged.

Video shot around 1 a.m. Friday showed waves pouring over the boardwalk. Friday was at least the third day of it. Swells pushed water onto the boardwalk and side streets Wednesday and came back Thursday to pound a bulkhead already weakened by earlier storms, the Long Beach Post reported.

The tide table is what has the city worried. Friday morning's high tide at the San Pedro reference station was forecast at 7.2 feet. Sunday's, at 9:49 a.m., is forecast at 7.6 feet, the week's highest, and the Weather Service warns that the coast could see isolated damage around then, with Long Beach singled out.

The Peninsula takes these hits because of a gap. The breakwater that shields most of Long Beach has an opening that lets swells through when they come in from the right angle to the south, the Post explained. Marie hit over Labor Day weekend and Hurricane Polo followed in late September, damaging the defenses and washing away the sand that protected the beach.

So the fixes happen at low tide, in whatever time the water allows. "We're just basically trying to create a buffer between that impact zone, the energy of the impact, and that wall," Marine Safety Chief Gonzalo Medina told the Post on Thursday. The city says it's handed out more than 6,300 sandbags for Rachel alone and more than 13,600 across the three storms.

The water itself is running high. Climate scientist Daniel Swain of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Post he's been getting calls from harbor masters and fire departments up and down the L.A. County coastline, telling him, "I've never seen water this high." One said it was the highest water in 30 years, and the tide that day wasn't even forecast to be a big one. A Kelvin wave, an underwater ripple that gets trapped along the coast, can add 6 to 12 inches to sea level, possibly for months.

Rain is next. Rachel was downgraded from a Category 1 hurricane early Thursday, and forecasters told the Post that rain could start in Long Beach as early as Saturday morning, totaling about a quarter to three-quarters of an inch. Medina said the wind worried him more, since weeks of heat have left trees weak enough to fall onto power lines.

Long Beach declared a local emergency Sept. 22 to prepare for the El Niño winter, and its sand replenishment projects are meant to rebuild the beach before the storm season. Swain doesn't expect the ocean to wait. "That's something that's actually going to get worse as we go into November and December," he told the Post.

Source: foxla.com, retrieved October 9, 2026. Other sources: lbpost.com.