It only took half an hour. High-tide floodwaters turned stretches of dry asphalt along Marin County’s Shoreline Highway, just north of San Francisco, into two-foot-deep tidal pools on Tuesday — coastal hazards that the National Weather Service says will linger in the Bay Area this month through Halloween.
In a truly haunting preview of the devastation that expanding warm water from El Niño’s Kelvin waves is expected to wreak during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday weeks in the United States, Northern California is now facing tidal flooding from San Pablo Bay to Monterey. San Francisco NPR station KQED and other local news stations have published drone footage showing paddleboarders and kayakers navigating commuter roads under the 101 Freeway in Sausalito, but the scale of the problem has been less severe elsewhere. High tide in the Bay Area broke its record on Monday for the highest ever recorded in the month of October.
Motorists found themselves stuck in low-lying coastal neighborhoods. Coastal fire departments are warning that California’s quintessential electric vehicles are at risk of uncontrollable battery fires if salt water shorts out their batteries. And further down the California coast, in Newport Beach, just south of Los Angeles, city officials are now handing out free sandbags ahead of the next fall and winter waves.
Projected flooding or (worse) levee failures along stretches of California State Route 37 near San Pablo Bay alone could cause recurring economic damages of $1.5 million per day, according to a new report by UC Davis landscape ecologist Fraser Shilling.
“We face the risk — but not the certainty — of catastrophic flooding in various coastal cities this winter,” Shilling, director of the UC Davis Road Ecology Center, said in a news release Monday. “My center and others have been sounding the alarm on this issue for over a decade. »
The king tides await
To put this week’s worrying flooding in context, the Bay Area’s current flooding has only been caused by so-called spring tides, high tides about twice a month produced predictably by the lunar cycle. According to oceanographer Sean Vitousek of the U.S. Geological Survey Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, tide gauges from this one routine tide reached about a foot above normal during this week’s flooding.
As Vitousek told the San Francisco Standard, this season’s powerful storms, along with the highest tides of the year, or “king,” along these coasts, will “certainly” produce “even worse impacts.”
“If big waves coincide with high tides, you risk a lot of damage,” Vitousek said.
According to Shilling’s analysis at UC Davis, these events could be once-in-a-century storms, “about 2 to 3 feet above current levels” during this year’s historic El Niño winter. Shilling has mapped six areas of the state that he fears will soon be at risk of catastrophic flooding, including San Francisco International Airport, low-lying beaches and roads in San Luis Obispo County, and stretches of U.S. Highway 101 through Corte Madera and Humboldt Bay. The problem, he said, was made worse by government inaction.
“Disasters will begin to occur without a significant state and federal response,” Shilling predicted.
Short circuit too
The lithium-ion batteries that power all those Cybertrucks and other electric vehicles dotting the Palo Alto landscape don’t mix well with salt water: They short-circuit their cells, which can start a self-perpetuating fire called thermal runaway. And the consequences this fundamental chemistry brings to California’s coastal communities during this El Niño season, with its promise of historic flooding, could prove devastating, according to volunteer fire captain, mechanical engineer and fire consultant Patrick Durham.
Durham noted that the problem also holds true for small devices powered by lithium-ion batteries, like cordless electric drills, leaf blowers and personal electronics. However, electric vehicles, given their battery size, are particularly dangerous, especially since electric vehicle owners tend not to think about the unique corrosive effects of seawater on the compartments that protect these batteries.
“If it’s been submerged in water, it’s bad,” Durham told the Los Angeles Times. “If it’s been submerged in salt water, it’s really bad.”
Gn usa
