Long Beach residents looked on in disbelief as powerful waves blasted through the seawall, tore apart sections of the boardwalk and transformed their neighborhood street into standing water within minutes.
“The conditions were very normal,” Evelina Mardirossian, 77, told The California Post. “And within five minutes, the entire street became a lake.”
Mardirossian and her husband, 75-year-old David Black, said the sudden garage flooding destroyed vehicles worth about $60,000.
“All of our cars are gone.”
“Her car was only three months old,” Black told The Post. “It had 1,500 miles on it.”
The Long Beach flooding was severe enough that roughly 20 oceanfront homes along the seawall between 63rd Place and 67th Place were placed under a mandatory evacuation order.
On Monday evening, Long Beach firefighters moved door to door, urging residents in the threatened area to evacuate.
By then, the scale of the damage had made the danger impossible to ignore.
Massive waves ripped planks completely out of the boardwalk during Monday night’s high tide, and Tuesday morning’s high tide made the damage even worse.
In some spots, the waves tore straight through the seawall separating the shore from the homes.
Water and debris were sent onto homes sitting alongside the boardwalk.
Residents have been working overtime to protect their properties, piling up sandbags and nailing boards over doors and windows as the surf keeps pounding the neighborhood.
One homeowner used several pieces of plywood and sandbags to try to block the water.
It still got through, leaving sand dumped across the porch.
“I wish I had known it was coming,” Del Sunperk, 49, told The Post. “I would at least put the sand bag where my front door is.”
And the worst damage may be the kind nobody can see.
One resident said the tide has been pulling sand out from underneath the homes, leaving their structural integrity questionable.
There are also reports of damaged and cracked concrete between some homes.
“The sand level is eroding. So the waves are not coming up and over as much as they’re hitting our boardwalk, which is collapsing in multiple places,” Jen Pieracci-Jensen, 45, told The Post. “So yeah, it’s super stressful.”
“We have a friend that was locked in her upstairs,” she said.
Waves as high as 12 feet closed beaches across Southern California and sent coastal flooding into Long Beach as Marie passed offshore.
Marie weakened to a tropical storm on Sunday hundreds of miles out to sea, but its remnants continued to hammer coastal Southern California Tuesday, with high surf and flooding still affecting communities.
Widespread coastal flooding was reported up and down the coast as the massive swells battered the shoreline.
Mardirossian said residents need more than a basic warning when dangerous conditions are coming.
“I think in the future when they know something like that is happening, instead of just an email saying, by the way, there will be king tides, they need to make a list of these things to do,” she said.
On Tuesday, public works crews were back on the beach with tractors, working to reinforce the sand berm before high tide.
Evacuated residents are staying in local emergency shelters or nearby hotels, while others have packed up essentials to stay with family until city inspectors clear their homes on Wednesday morning.
