With two storms now arriving in Southern California, residents in coastal erosion prone areas should take extra precautions to avoid potential landslides and flooding, experts say.
For those living on the bluff
Narrowing of the beaches means breaking waves are now closer to the shoreline, and when combined with big storm events where rainfall soaks into the bluffs, it can result in a landslide, said Joseph Street, manager of the California Coastal Commission’s Energy Ocean Resources and Federal Consistency Unit.
“During stormy periods, you tend to have more erosion and more of these catastrophic events, like bluff failures,” he said. “Rise in sea level that has occurred historically and is expected by most scientific projections to increase and accelerate in the future and that would be expected to exacerbate these types of storm related coastal erosion events.”
If you live on the top of a bluff, Street said, “check out the seaward side and look for things like gullies forming from runoff, look for cracks in the ground, look for signs of active erosion.”