High Tide May Not Live Up to Its Image

The job of forecasting ocean tides has its ups and downs.

The lows come when experts have to issue urgent calls for sandbagging to keep coastal homes from washing away and emergency evacuation orders to save beachfront residents’ lives.

The highs come on days such as Friday, when experts predicted that an especially high tide will hit Southland beaches on Sunday but cause little or no damage between Santa Barbara and San Diego.

The highest tide in 17 years is expected to be produced by an unusual lineup of the Earth, moon and sun. Additionally, the moon’s orbit will place it 17,223 miles closer to the Earth on Sunday than it usually is--which is 238,855 miles away.

As a result, the tide along Los Angeles-area beaches will measure 7.3 feet--compared with the normal five feet.

Because the weather will be too calm to kick up waves, coastline damage is expected to be light.

There is no evidence that the gravitational pull from the moon and sun will have any effect on seismic waves, scientists said, debunking a widely circulated prediction that the heavenly bodies will trigger a major earthquake Sunday or Monday on the New Madrid Fault in the Midwest.

“It will be a good day for beachcombing. I’ll be on the beach, you can be sure of that,” said Fergus J. Wood, a geophysicist from San Diego County who has spent more than 30 years studying tides.

“The moon has only been this close to the Earth 30 times in the past 300 years. It’s a very interesting natural phenomenon. As long as there is no wind.”

There should not be much of that, according to Steve Burback, a meteorologist for WeatherData Inc., which provides weather forecasts to The Times.

Saturday will be a “little gusty,” Burback said, but that will diminsh Sunday.

Scientists calculate that a 7.3-foot high tide will occur on Los Angeles-area beaches at 8:08 a.m. Sunday. A low tide of -1.66 feet will occur at 3:32 p.m. A slightly lower high tide is predicted for 8:55 a.m. Monday.

Beachfront merchants in Redondo Beach were preparing for the worst Friday. Heaps of sandbags were at the ready outside the doorways of harbor fish markets and restaurants. Some were hoping rising seawater would send a tide of business their way.

In Santa Monica, lifeguards have taken normal winter precautions of moving their towers to the back of the beach and bulldozing sand berms to slow down erosion from winter storms, said Lt. Mickey Gallagher, a Los Angeles County lifeguard.

Wayne Shumaker, chief of the safety and sanitation division of the county’s Beaches and Harbors Department, said 10- to 14-foot-high berms have been built at such beaches as Dockweiler, Venice, Hermosa, Malibu and Torrance.

Although some beachfront residents of Ventura County were sandbagging their homes Friday, others were planning to fill buckets with Pismo clams during Sunday’s low tide at local beaches.

This year’s mild weather has left abundant sand to support the unusually high number of Pismo clams on Ventura County beaches, said Capt. Roger Reese, chief enforcement officer with the California Department of Fish and Game.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Julio Moran, Shawn Hubler, Joanna Miller and Jonathan Gaw.