Laguna Beach officials have declared a local emergency after Hurricane Marie stripped away unprecedented amounts of sand and endangered oceanfront homes.
The city announced the emergency proclamation last week as swells that began September 2 continued to reshape the iconic Orange County coastline. Dave Kiff, 67, the Laguna Beach city manager serving as Director of Emergency Services, warned that the volume of sand lost was unlike anything most residents had witnessed.
“Most of us have never seen this much sand leave our beaches at once. We expect it to come back, but we are not counting on it, and with a very strong El Niño forecast we need the ability to act quickly to protect homes, beaches and public infrastructure,” Kiff said.
The declaration grants the city immediate authority to launch emergency shoreline protection, sand placement, debris removal, assessments and repairs without ordinary contracting delays. Six oceanfront homes on Ocean Way and Lagunita Drive have already been yellow-tagged after their sea walls were compromised by the pounding surf.
The parking lot at Aliso Beach has partially failed under the assault, and multiple coastal access points are now shut down entirely. The south end of Lagunita Beach, Pearl Street Beach, the footpath at Christmas Cove and the Aliso Beach parking lot all remain temporarily closed to the public.
“Swell beginning September 2 caused significant sand movement and erosion that is still ongoing,” the city said in a press release announcing the emergency. “The proclamation allows the City to move immediately on emergency shoreline protection, sand placement, debris removal, assessments and repairs without the delay of ordinary contracting procedures.”
The immediate damage from Marie, which churned in the Pacific and sent powerful south-directed swells toward the Southern California coast, represents only the opening phase of what scientists warn could be a brutal stretch for the state’s beaches. The emergency declaration positions Laguna Beach to accelerate repairs before conditions potentially worsen.
John Warrick, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said Los Angeles that the summer storm pattern has already been unusually severe for south-facing beaches like those in Laguna.
“The summertime storms have been fairly excessive this year, which has impacted those beaches that are directed toward the south,” Warrick said. “This coming winter, we’re expecting the storms in the North Pacific to cause all the challenges.”
Warrick added that El Niño winters typically bring larger-than-normal North Pacific storms, meaning the beaches suffering now may not even be the hardest hit in coming months. “And so generally in El Niño, those storms off the North Pacific are larger than normal, and so, by all means, we most likely will be seeing different beaches impacted this winter than we’re seeing this summer,” he continued.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center has projected a greater than 90 percent chance of a very strong El Niño event this fall and winter, with a 75 percent chance of a historic event exceeding the strength of any previous El Niño dating back to 1950.
That forecast helped drive the city’s decision to act now rather than wait for standard bureaucratic processes. The dual threat—Marie’s immediate destruction followed by the looming El Niño—has transformed what might have been routine coastal maintenance into an urgent infrastructure crisis for one of California’s most photographed shorelines.