Dozens of Long Beach residents previously evacuated from their Peninsula homes Monday night were allowed to return Wednesday, after building inspectors deemed the structures safe.
Long Beach Fire Department Capt. Jack Crabtree said the city’s building department cleared 18 of the 19 evacuated properties by 8 a.m. Wednesday, and they began notifying residents later that morning. One home was yellow tagged, meaning its homeowner can only go inside to retrieve essential belongings.
This comes roughly two days after a series of strong ocean swells — supercharged by the remnants of Hurricane Marie miles off the Pacific Coast — battered the city’s Peninsula and its tiny strip of homes. Waves clawed away enormous amounts of beachfront sand, puncturing sections of the wooden boardwalk and chewing away at more than a dozen homes’ foundations.
When Carmen Vaudry returned Wednesday, she discovered her home’s deck facing the boardwalk had been damaged. In the 13 years living there, she’s never seen anything like it — waves that hit the seawall and then soared into the air, shooting water upward beyond her roof. The sound, she said, “was like cannonballs.”
“Shakes the whole house,” she said. “Just slammed against, it sounded like earthquakes.”
“Either way, even if they didn’t evacuate, we were going to have to leave,” Vaudry said.
Another man, who asked to be identified as C, spent the day cleaning the two-foot trench of sand that accumulated along his alley. As opposed to Vaudry, his evacuation was voluntary, so he stayed. He remembers how the waves hit a sand berm meant to protect homes but also formed “a launch ramp,” shooting water up onto the boardwalk and into his alley. Over the course of several days, it formed a river of floating debris.
He and other neighbors — about 15 to 20 of them — grabbed shovels on Monday and began digging out their section of boardwalk path.
Compared to when he bought his home in 2009, when the shore was 100 yards from the seawall, the ocean is now nearly at C’s door, sending water and sand at such intensity that he had to tow his neighbors’ cars over the weekend. “Now it’s a constant construction zone,” he said of the beachfront.
The storm forced the evacuation of about 20 structures, left stretches of boardwalk in tatters and swallowed a swathe of city beach seemingly overnight.
So far, the city hasn’t released any plans for repairs to the boardwalk, which remains closed between 63rd Place and 68th Place. The Claremont beach parking lot, at 5400 E. Ocean Blvd., has reopened fully for public use.
Beach crews, meanwhile, are focused on rebuilding. Bulldozers and dump trucks were seen rumbling by, dumping mounds of sand towards what they want to be a 10-foot-tall berm some 4,000 feet wide that they’ve seen repeatedly washed away since Sunday.
The standard berm is approximately 2,500 feet long, but city crews, in preparation for the storm incident, extended it to a total of 4,000 feet from 55th to 72nd Place. Kelly Armstrong, the beach superintendent, said crews worked extended shifts of up to 16 hours from Thursday through Tuesday to reinforce the berm.
Emergency repairs were conducted along the boardwalk’s wooden seawall on Tuesday night, he said, meant to fend off a high tide that officials say reached three feet at around 8 p.m.
After waves reached six feet Sunday and Monday, waves Tuesday night reached two to three feet high and are expected to crest at two feet Wednesday night.
It’s all to protect a narrow strip of oceanfront homes along the Peninsula between 62nd and 69th places, which is exposed to swells that pass through the gap outside the breakwater and jetty that juts from the Alamitos Bay channel.
A longer-term issue will be restoring the swathe of beachfront sand that was ripped from the shoreline. Unable to give an approximate figure, Armstrong said there are three-to-four block sections where up to 10 feet deep of sand has disappeared.
“It’s not anything that anyone has ever seen since, you know, maybe the 30s or the 40s,” said Armstrong. (The year 1939 is remembered for a massive storm that wrecked homes on the Peninsula.)
“There’s a lot of different agencies that have been inspecting the beachfront and inspecting the wall, the seawall, and looking at, you know, avenues of repair, as well as our city engineers were out there,” Armstrong said.
A greater worry, officials say, is the frequency of high tides that trample through the city’s sand walls and flood streets, as changing ocean dynamics and El Niño conditions spurred by climate change create taller and warmer tides — above predictions this season, according to the National Weather Service.
Long Beach is near to awarding a contract to commence a $14.5 million dredging project that, if approved, should start in late October and extend the beach out by 260 feet using 415,000 cubic yards of sand from the entrance channel of Alamitos Bay.
Any other measures are still under consideration.