The reality of sea level rise has California cornered, and we don’t have many ways out. A special report from the L.A. Times.
Beaches are the state’s pride and joy. Many could vanish by the end of the century, depending on how Californians choose to adapt to sea level rise.
Here, what other cities in California are only beginning to worry about in the abstract is already a much-lived reality. Powerful waves crest over the main pier and threaten roads with names such as Beach Boulevard and Shoreview Avenue. Blasts of sand batter walls and homes. Windows shatter. Cliffs collapse. Residents bear witness to entire chunks of hillside crumbling into the surf below.
The shocks continued. Years of drought followed by heavy storms in 2016 forced more than a dozen bluff-top residences to be tagged as unsafe. Three apartment buildings — suddenly dangling off the edge — could not be saved and were demolished. “There’s a public cost and a private cost in any choice that we make, and we need to start doing that cost-benefit analysis,” said Charles Lester, director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, who has consulted for a number of towns, including Pacifica, on sea level rise planning.
“The public has rights to the beach, but I apparently don’t have rights to my house,” she said after one particularly heated meeting that pitted homeowners against conservationists. “I’m a left-of-left Democrat, but these environmental zealots are next level.” One recent morning, Drake stood on her second-story deck and talked over the roar of sand dozers clearing roads. The area floods whenever waves top the seawall or there’s a break in the berm. The city brings in a pump during the winter to push stormwater back into the ocean.
Many still distrust where this document is headed. John Keener, who championed the issue as mayor before losing his bid for reelection, wonders how much will change under the new leaders in power. “We’ll be in survival mode,” he said. “The other aspects of climate change are going to simply just overwhelm us as a society.”
Defending the entire state could cost homeowners and taxpayers more than $22 billion in the next 20 years if the sea rises even a moderate amount, according to aAnd each seawall is a choice, conscious or not, to sacrifice the beach in front. The barriers disrupt the natural replenishment of sand, stripping away beaches until they narrow or vanish altogether. Some states have banned new seawalls: Oregon, North Carolina, Maine. Others have imposed significant restrictions.
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