Seaside Residents Batten Down the Hatches for Storm Season

When Elizabeth Fleming spotted the killer waves rolling ominously toward her oceanfront apartment in Imperial Beach one March morning four winters ago, she knew that nothing short of the Great Wall of China would stop them.

So, as the surf pounded across the sand and streamed in through her back door, Fleming did what she felt was the only sensible thing to do--she opened up the front door to let the seawater pour out.

Then, helpless for the moment, Fleming climbed upstairs, opened a bottle of champagne and settled down to watch.

“I learned long ago that when you live on the beach, you’ve got to respect the Pacific Ocean and put up with its moods,” said the 60-year-old writer who has lived in the two-story apartment for nine years. “When that big flood hit, I decided the best thing to do was just pop the cork.”

Not everyone, however, took so philosophical a view of the winter storm season of 1982-83, which forced dozens of families from their homes and inflicted $17 million in damage to public and private property in San Diego County.

And now, some seaside residents fear that the ocean and the elements may be gearing up for a repeat performance.

Several record-setting high tides are expected in San Diego at the end of the month, oceanographers say, and the peak tide is due to roll in on New Year’s Eve. If a wicked storm were to strike at the same time, scientists fear it could whip up the brimming seas and send breakers crashing onto the shore, threatening homes and businesses up and down the coast.

If such a scenario were to unfold, the damage along some stretches could be greater than in past years because much of the sand swept off by previous storms has yet to return, leaving narrow, cobbly beaches that form a scant buffer between the ocean and residents on its doorstep.

Although preliminary weather forecasts predict a relatively mild winter, veterans of the 1982-83 storm season from North County to the South Bay are taking the high-tide warnings seriously.

Residents and business owners who paid the price for being caught unprepared in past years are bracing themselves for the worst, stockpiling sandbags, stacking protective boulders in front of their homes and keeping a close watch on the skies.

“I’m worried, no doubt about it,” said Bill Frey, who in 1983 watched the surf toss a giant timber through a glass windbreak that surrounds the patio in front of his beachfront home in Del Mar. “We’ve got a seawall and riprap out front to protect us, but if there’s a storm they won’t do us much good.”

Frey, for one, plans to nail three-quarter-inch plywood across his front picture windows before the high tides roll in Dec. 31. And he’ll have plenty of sandbags and shovels on hand in case the surf kicks up. He also plans to “pray a lot.”

“We’re having an open house,” said Frey, an avocado grower who bought his home in 1963. “Anyone who’s good with a shovel is invited.”

Cities and various emergency response agencies, meanwhile, also are getting set for the storm season, holding a flurry of seminars and summit meetings to hammer out strategies to use in the event the county is hit by flooding and high surf.

Dan Eberle, chief of the county’s Office of Disaster Preparedness, said his agency has “put the word out about the high tides” to all the cities in the county and discussed the threat they pose to the coast at several meetings. In addition, the agency is selling sandbags at cost to property owners interested in taking protective action and is keeping in close touch with weather forecasters.

“There’s not a lot we can do beyond just keeping our eyes open and making sure people are alerted,” Eberle said. “If we get the lethal combination of high tide and big storms, there is the potential for serious damage. We just have to wait and see.”

In Oceanside, which lost half of its fishing pier to winter storms in 1976 and 1978, and suffered property damage in 1983, work crews are constructing temporary seawalls and amassing sandbags to protect the lifeguard headquarters and other public buildings along the beach.

Dick Watenpaugh, the city’s recreation director, said Oceanside officials also are stockpiling sand around town and mapping out plans in the event a storm hits New Year’s Eve.

“We feel that we’ve done all we can at this point,” Watenpaugh said. “Now it’s a matter of crossing our fingers and hoping Mother Nature is gentle with us.”

Down the coast in Carlsbad, where most homes are on bluffs out of reach of the surf, city officials have two storm-related worries--a low-lying stretch of Carlsbad Boulevard that is subject to flooding and a seawall that is under construction.

City Manager Frank Aleshire said work crews will sandbag the stretch of Carlsbad Boulevard--a quarter of a mile south of Palomar Airport Road--in an effort to prevent the surf from undermining the pavement and possibly destroying sewer and water lines under the route.

As for the seawall, a $4-million project designed to prevent erosion of the bluffs, workers are creating giant sand berms to protect the structure, which runs three-quarters of a mile along the beach north of Tamarack Avenue.

In the City of Encinitas, most of the defensive action is along the so-called “restaurant row” in the Cardiff area. At Cardiff State Beach, the strip of eateries was devastated by waves in the 1983 storms, with surf crashing through the front windows of the Triton, the Chart House and Charlie’s.

The Triton alone suffered about $250,000 in damage. But this time, the manager says, the restaurant is ready.

“In ‘83, all we had were some cosmetic rocks out front,” said manager Dave Olson, who keeps a tide table on the wall of his office. “Now, we’ve got truckloads piled out there,” making a rock revetment about 20 feet deep and 30 feet wide.

In addition, 40 sheets of numbered plywood are on hand and the employees are trained to bolt them into place over the front windows in the event of high surf. A drill to test the staff’s prowess at assembling the wooden wall was held recently. It took 20 minutes to put the panel together.

Both Charlie’s and the Chart House have built similar fortifications and are on alert.

“I think we’ll weather pretty much anything OK,” said Chart House general manager Peter Holder, “but I’ll be on hand New Year’s Eve with my snorkel and fins just in case.”

In Del Mar, protection of beachfront homes is a sensitive issue--perhaps the most controversial topic in the tiny community. For years, seaside residents have argued that they must be permitted to shield their homes with walls and riprap, even if such protective devices extend onto the public beach. Inland dwellers argue that such encroachment is illegal.

An ordinance designed to settle the dispute is due before the City Council early next year. Meanwhile, the city has adopted an “interim barrier” ordinance that permits homeowners to obtain permits for “emergency” protective structures.

On other fronts, City Manager Kay Jimno said the city has “winterized” its drainage system, freeing it of debris so runoff can flow freely; installed pumps in low-lying areas to siphon off water in the event of flooding; created giant sand mounds at the street ends along the beach to prevent flooding and trimmed the palm trees along Coast Boulevard to “prevent those lovely palm fronds from tumbling down in high winds.”

Mission Beach, Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach are the areas most prone to flooding and surf damage in San Diego, and city officials have focused their energies on those communities.

Bill Wolf, coordinator of the city’s Emergency Management Office, said “storm packets”--with information on the tides, where to obtain weather and other emergency information, how to fill and place sandbags and the like--have been distributed to all residents along the shore in Ocean Beach, Mission Beach and Pacific Beach and to some locations at La Jolla Shores.

In addition, work crews have created protective sand berms in areas that are prone to flooding, and a high surf preparedness meeting will be held Tuesday to coordinate efforts of the city agencies that would be called to action if a storm coincides with the high tide.

Elsewhere in San Diego, the folks who run the venerable Marine Room restaurant in La Jolla say they will merely be hoping for the best when the high tide hits later this month. The 1932 landmark, so named because the ocean normally laps gently at its large picture windows, was devastated and closed for 10 months after a December, 1982, storm that sent breakers crashing right into the dining room.

“Before we reopened, the place was redone from the ground floor up, with steel framing around the windows and new, thicker glass,” said manager Julia Weinthal. “But beyond that, there’s not a lot more we can do. We’re like a sitting duck right out on the sand.”

In the South Bay, the area hardest hit during the 1983 storms, residents seem particularly attuned to the tide threat. At the height of the storms, the surf ripped away one-fifth of newly rebuilt fishing pier in Imperial Beach and caused flooding that required the evacuation of some families by boat.

Imperial Beach officials are wholesaling sandbags for 23 cents apiece at City Hall, and many seaside homeowners have brought in truckloads of protective riprap in an effort to protect their property.

“I’m scared,” said Jackie Dewey, who has lived in a spacious home on Sea Coast Drive in Imperial Beach since 1967. “In ‘83, the sea was throwing rocks against the plywood over our windows and the waves were breaking and dripping off the eaves of the roof. I was whimpering. This time, the tide’s going to be even bigger. I’m afraid we might all end up in the Colorado River.”

Dewey, like many of her neighbors, has purchased sandbags from the city and hired workers to truck in rocks to beef up the bulwark that now protects her home. That action, however, seems to have gotten her in some hot water with the state Coastal Commission, which has issued letters to Dewey and other homeowners, threatening them with fines for failing to obtain permits for the beach work.

“My neighbors were doing it, and I figured that since we were just adding onto something that was already there, we didn’t need any permit,” Dewey said.

Not so, said Adam Birnbaum, a staff planner for the commission. Any sort of seawall or protective rock designed to fend off the surf requires an emergency permit, which may be obtained more quickly than the typical coastal permit.

“If anyone contemplates any work along the shoreline, they need to call us or come in and apply for a permit,” Birnbaum said. “We have had trouble in the past with these so-called ‘emergency, temporary’ structures becoming permanent encroachments on the public beach, so we need to keep a close watch on these things.”

According to oceanographer Reinhard E. Flick, the high tide predicted for Dec. 31 will be 7.8 feet. That mark is the highest predicted since the late 1960s and slightly higher than the tide that rolled in during the stormy, memorable March of 1983, Flick said.

But in 1983, the sea level was elevated by an El Nino, a phenomenon that causes eastern Pacific waters to warm up and can bring heavy rains and other weather aberrations. An El Nino weather pattern has not been forecast for this winter, Flick said.

“If we’re lucky, these high tides will cause minor flooding but won’t pose a major problem at all,” said Flick, who works for the state Department of Boating and Waterways but is based at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “But if we get a local storm--or even a distant Pacific storm that generates some high waves--then there could be trouble.”

Hardest hit if such a combination of events occurs, Flick believes, would be the North County, because the region’s beaches in many cases remain stripped of the sand swept off by the storms of 1982-83.

“The best defense against coastal damage is a wide sandy beach, and those are hard to find in North County,” Flick said. “There are a lot of narrow strips of cobbles up there. Consequently, the area is more vulnerable than other beaches in the county that have recovered quite nicely.”

As for guarding against the storm and tide threat, Flick says there’s really no solid defense against the ocean’s fury. Elizabeth Fleming couldn’t agree more.

“Oh, I’m not going to bother with sandbags,” she said. “They just make a mess on the porch. If a storm comes, I’ll just pull up the carpets.”

And keep plenty of champagne on ice.