New Year’s Eve Could Be a Wet One If High Tide Fits the Pattern

A retired government meteorologist is living with an uneasy secret. He has scientific evidence that next New Year’s Eve, killer tides could rise up and smite the land, wreaking havoc along low-lying coastal areas and, if they hit without warning, take a heavy toll in lives.

Fergus J. Wood, 69, a Bonita resident and former official of the National Ocean Survey, a government agency in Washington, D.C., has written a thick book on tidal movements based on the positions of the earth, moon and sun--major factors in the ebb and flow of the oceans. The next date when the oceans are most likely to surge is Dec. 31, 1986.

This knowledge of a “window of vulnerability” poses an ethical question for Wood. Should he warn the world about a possible tidal disaster of the ferocity that took 40 lives and caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage on the East Coast in March, 1962? Would anyone believe him if he did? And what would be the reaction if his warning is believed? Panic or preparedness?

And what if the flood warning turns out to be a false alarm because one key factor in the scenario--a strong wind blowing over a long reach of ocean toward land--does not materialize? Will the world file his name among others labeled crackpots who have predicted dire events that failed to occur? Will the future danger periods--which a combination of scientific fact and historical data indicate will occur at roughly 18-month intervals--be ignored?

Wood’s foundations for sounding an alarm about a possible tidal disaster are not based on Ouija board messages or on glimpses from a crystal ball.

The projected tidal uprisings are based on charting solar-lunar positions so stable that they can be predicted for decades in advance--an exercise that Wood has accomplished through the year 2064.

What he contends--and experts don’t contradict him--is that when two cosmic events occur at approximately the same time, tides around the world will rise higher and more swiftly.

Those two events are perigee and syzygy. In layman’s language, perigee (pronounced PAIR-ah-gee) is the point when the moon in its irregular orbit most closely approaches the earth, increasing its gravitational power over tidal movements by its proximity.

Syzygy (pronounced SIZZ-ah-gee), a word few non-scientists encounter, refers to the near-alignment of the sun, moon and earth--an event that also increases the lunar-solar impact on the Earth’s tides. When these two events occur within hours or even within days of each other, record tidal surges occur.

Wood has coined the word proxigee to define the coinciding of the two predictable events, and has charted the occurrences back to the 9th Century, documenting historical evidence of coastal flooding coinciding with the proxigean tides.

In 1635, for instance, a historian in the Massachusetts Bay Colony recorded a proxigean event, describing how the sea appeared to swell and the Indians took to the trees. Wood’s tidal flooding history goes as far back as 1099 and as recently as 1983.

An unheralded three-day storm that occurred March 5-7, 1962, along the Atlantic coastline coincided with the high, strong tides resulting from near-concurrence of perigee-syzygy. It threw a wall of water onto beaches at Fire Island, N.Y., and Rehoboth Beach, Del. Along the coastline from South Carolina to Maine, the tidal onslaught swept hundreds of buildings out to sea or pushed them off their foundations.

Atlantic City, not a gambling mecca then, was drowned in tidal waters, as were most low-lying coastal towns in Delaware, New Jersey and New York. Commuter tunnels into New York City were closed because of water seepage. More than one freighter was swamped and beached; an oil tanker split in two as the tidal flows were shaped into mountains by strong onshore winds that reached 70 m.p.h.

On March 6, 1962, television personality Dave Garroway concluded the sale of his Westhampton, N.Y., beach home. On March 7, the $39,000 building was washed out to sea, one of 43 demolished along that reach of Long Island’s south shore.

When the storm was over, the death toll was 40. In a day before million-dollar price tags on beach property, the damage reached $500 million.

The same conditions of perigee and syzygy that existed during the March, 1962, coastal flooding will exist again during the three days around New Year’s Eve, Wood warns.

However, the trigger that sets off the rampage of damaging waves into vulnerable coastal lowlands--strong, steady onshore winds coursing over miles of ocean--is not a predictable factor. Without that added wind-blown impetus, Wood’s proxigean tides could just be gentle giants, lapping higher on the shoreline, possibly causing some flooding, but not crashing through beachfront cottages or ripping out pier pilings and rock revetments.

So what should he do? Ruin the party plans of Malibu merrymakers? Cancel the New Year’s Eve celebrations at Cardiff’s seaside restaurant row? Call off the year-end beach parties along Southern California’s ocean strands?

The last time Wood made a warning was in late 1973, when he was beginning his research on tidal surges, an effort that has mushroomed into a 721-page textbook. A canny public information officer with the National Ocean Survey, where he was employed, asked him to name the date of the next perigee-syzygy event.

Although Wood issued a disclaimer that the proxigean event could produce nothing more than higher tides unless the wind and weather misbehaved, the date he named--Jan. 8, 1974--became a worldwide coastal flood watch.

“It all just got out of hand. I had calls from all over, even a cablegram from South America somewhere,” Wood recalled about the earlier alert. “It was on the front page of the Washington Post, I remember, and I had calls from all the major networks. It started with stories on Associated Press and United Press that went all over. It was even in a paper in Kansas, if you can imagine anyone in Kansas being interested in tides.”

After the alert, a storm system along the Southern California coast brought the flooding and damage that Wood had anticipated in his flood advisory. Then, about three days later, the same proxigean tides harassed the west coast of England and the north and west coasts of Europe, causing lowland flooding and damage.

“We felt vindicated in issuing the advisory by subsequent events,” he said, “but the way the news was handled--sensationalized and with many of the cautionary statements left out--is something that must not be allowed to happen again.”

Wood doesn’t want another such sensationalizing of his scientific research occurring next New Year’s Eve. But, he acknowledges, a lack of warning of the year-end “window of vulnerability” could add to the death and damage toll if, indeed, the deadly mix of high tides and high winds occurs.

Wood has never made a formal prediction of coastal flooding because there’s no way of knowing in advance the meteorological conditions that will occur, and he does not want to make one now. But because the New Year’s Eve event so nearly matches the 1962 disaster period in proxigean tide levels, he wants to warn coastal residents to be alert to the potential danger.

While a strong onshore storm blowing in from the far reaches of the Pacific could raise tidal surges by 20% to 40%, an offshore wind could counteract the thrust of the abnormally high tides, he concedes. No wind at all could reduce tidal flooding from a catastrophe to an inconvenience.

But, he stresses, awareness of the possibility of a destructive tidal surge could save lives and property.

Wood points out that perigee and syzygy occur only four hours apart next Dec. 31--the same close timing that occurred during the killer tides of 1962.

At 8:44 a.m. on Dec. 31, 1986, the tides off San Diego will be at record heights, a healthy 7.8 feet; at 8:30 a.m. the same day, the tides will reach a height of 7.3 feet in Los Angeles’ outer harbor.

On the East Coast, the moment of highest vulnerability will be 10:52 a.m. in Boston, with an 11.7-foot peak, and 8:54 a.m. at Savannah, Ga., with an 8.9-foot peak.

Add to these record high tides the dense development that now covers almost every sandy beach from Hawaii to the Nigerian coastline.

Add also the warming water temperatures that are gradually melting the polar icecaps, raising sea levels worldwide.

These trends can only increase the tidal flooding potential, Wood said, but they don’t help to pinpoint the timing or location of the next major coastal flooding disaster.

Wood’s exhaustive charts show that after the 1986 proxigee, another “window of vulnerability” is due on Oct. 14, 1989, and that a series of extreme proxigean tides will arrive on Dec. 2, 1990, Jan. 2, 1992, and March 8, 1993.

Bernard Zetler, a retired Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher, doesn’t dispute Wood’s theory, but he does differ on the dates of danger that Wood has charted for the next decade.

Zetler also emphasized that, while tidal heights have been predictable with a great degree of accuracy for more than a century, no one has been able to predict with any accuracy at all the coincidence of storm conditions at the periods of extremely high tides.

Wood does not contest Zetler’s cautionary advice. He only points out that the point of highest vulnerability occurs at the moment of the highest proxigean tide on New Year’s Eve.

What Wood plans to do, and what he advises others in vulnerable coastal areas to do as the New Year’s Eve high tides approach, is to keep a weather eye out for possible storms that will accelerate the high tides into destructive walls of water.

And, he admits, he’ll probably do his New Year’s Eve celebrating on high ground this year.