Coastal Flooding
Elevated tides flood Newport Beach's Balboa Peninsula, and the city tells people to stay away.
Ocean water surged onto Balboa Peninsula streets and into homes around 10:30 a.m. Sunday. Newport Beach urged people to stay away.
An advisory from the city told residents and visitors to avoid the peninsula, citing street flooding from storm conditions and tides running well above normal. Crews were already responding, the city said, according to CBS News.
Erik Weigand saw it firsthand. Streets underwater. Homes too. The Newport Beach city councilmember told CBS News the tide climbed onto streets and into homes at The Wedge, 51st Street and the stretch between 12th and 17th Street. "It's absolutely brutal out there," he said.
"These Kelvin waves are real," Weigand said. "It's not a wave like you would see with swell, but it's a tidal push, and we're projecting those to be 20 inches greater than what high tides projected." High tide hit the peninsula at 8:50 a.m. It returns at 9:13 p.m.
A coastal flooding advisory from the National Weather Service runs through Tuesday. Every high tide is expected to run higher than normal along south-facing beaches, including stretches of Long Beach, Dana Point and Laguna Beach, CBS News said. Sunday carries the biggest risk, the agency said, with tides that could run one to one and a half feet above chart predictions.
The first nor'easter of the season hit the Northeast with gusts up to 74 mph and waves as high as three meters, flooding New York City streets and cutting power to roughly 200,000 people, according to The Guardian. One person died when a tree fell in Brooklyn. That same storm uncovered wreckage from the Warren Sawyer, a three-masted ship that sank in 1884. It washed ashore on Nantucket, The Guardian reported.
Aerial footage over the Balboa Peninsula caught people wading barefoot through flooded sidewalks. Others stood knee-deep in rain boots. Cars sat nearly half-submerged, CBS News reported. The city told drivers not to push through flooded streets and asked residents to take alternate routes and follow directions from public safety crews.
Crews remained on the scene. Damage estimates were not yet available, CBS News reported.