The storms began in December and didn’t end until March. California was hit with heavy rain, massive amounts of snow, gale-force winds, hail the size of ping-pong balls, and even a tornado. Storm swells, huge waves, and astronomical tides combined into a powerful destructive force, which pummeled the coast, flooding thousands of houses, destroying homes, piers, businesses, infrastructure, and swamping stretches of Pacific Coast Highway.
Creeks and rivers flooded. Reservoirs filled to capacity and threatened the integrity of dams. The entire coast was impacted. Beaches lost sand. Surfbreaks changed overnight, cliffs eroded, houses fell into the ocean. Thousands of people were forced to evacuate. Many returned to find devastation. That was the El Niño winter of 1982-83. It remains the strongest and most destructive El Niño season on record, but that may be about to change.
El Niño and La Niña are the opposite extremes of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. During an ENSO neutral year, trade winds blow west along the equator, moving warm water from east to west in the Pacific, generating upwelling—nutrient-rich cold water from the deep ocean. During a La Niña year, trade winds increase, pushing more warm water towards Asia, drawing more cold water up from the depths, and moving the Gulf Stream north, resulting in dryer, warmer conditions in the south, and colder and wetter ones in the north. In an El Niño year, the trade winds weaken and all of the warm water moves east instead of west, pushing the Gulf Stream south, bringing warmer, dryer winter weather to the north and east, and wetter weather to the south and west. ENSO impacts not just North American weather but the rest of the world’s weather, too, but here on the West coast we have a front row seat for the full impact of this weather phenomenon.
El Niño and La Niña can be mild or severe, sometimes they behave as predicted, sometimes they don’t, and act instead as a force of pure chaos, a kind of meteorological wild card. There have been wet La Niña years in California, and dry El Niño years, but more often than not, a strong El Niño brings the potential for wide-scale disaster.
The impacts of the El Niño weather pattern that has been building in the Pacific this summer are already being felt. It’s brought tropical heat, humidity and big waves to Southern California; massive wildfires to Canada that have blanketed Eastern North America in smoke; and a deadly heat wave to Europe that has claimed at least 10,000 lives.
The most recent NOAA advisory on the weather phenomenon is: El Niño is present, it will continue to strengthen through the end of the year, with a 97% chance it will persist through early spring 2027, and there continues to be the potential for this to become the strongest El Niño on record.
What does that mean for local residents in the Santa Monica Mountains and coast? No one really knows yet, but we do know what happened during the previous record-holder, the winter of 1983.
Eleven of the 40 public piers on the California Coast were damaged in epic storms from December 1982 to March of 1983. The Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, and San Clemente piers were badly battered by huge waves in January. The storms tore 250 feet off the end of the Huntington Beach Pier, including the cafe at the end of it. The end of the Santa Monica Pier was also ripped away and smashed into pieces, taking with it cranes, a boat derrick, several cars, half of the Porthole Restaurant (also known as the Santa Monica Pier Cafe), and the harbormaster’s office. The Paradise Cove Pier was ripped in two and almost completely destroyed. On March 3, the already damaged Malibu Pier was hit again, collapsing part of the already battered structure. The damage was so severe the state was uncertain if it could be saved.
Debris from the piers washed ashore all along the coast. Some of it large and dangerous, like the multi-ton boat crane from the Paradise Cove Pier that came ashore at Escondido Beach. Wooden piles washed up all along the coast.
Thousands of Southern California homes were damaged that winter, including more than a hundred Malibu houses. Four local beach houses were ripped from their foundations and swept into the ocean.
The January 28 Los Angeles Times reported that Los Flores Beach resident Becky Illagen was woken up in the early hours of the morning by the waves hitting her house. “I knew it was all over when I saw the hot tub sail by into the ocean,” she told the Times. She just had time to get out before her house collapsed into the ocean. In the Malibu Colony, big waves tossed debris from damaged houses through ocean-facing windows and into living rooms. One resident ended up with an entire tree trunk in her living room, together with broken glass, and a ton of sand and mud. She told the Times, “It sounded like a jet had crashed.” Her next door neighbors rushed to help and narrowly avoided debris crashing through their own windows seconds later.
Storm-powered, twenty-foot-plus waves poured onto Pacific Coast Highway in low lying areas, up and down the coast, flooding the road with debris. At Zuma, the ocean swells tore up the county beach parking lot and scattered concrete blocks and huge chunks of asphalt all over the flooded road. The highway at Corral Beach was swamped, and so was a several-mile-long stretch near the Ventura County line. Mudslides triggered by the heavy rain shut down other parts of the coast route, including a seven-mile stretch of PCH west of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
In the canyons, the back-to-back storms flooded creeks and triggered landslides. Topanga Canyon Boulevard experienced relatively minor rockfalls and flooding—a relief for residents still recovering from the major floods in 1980. Malibu Canyon fared less well. A landslide trapped motorists in two cars and shut the road down for days.
Towards the end of this cataclysmic storm cycle, on March 1, South Central Los Angeles was hit by a significant F2 tornado that touched down near 51st Street. It mowed down power poles and lines, damaged 100 houses and destroyed 50 more, before lifting near Olympic. No one had ever seen anything like that, not in Los Angeles.
The impact on California was front page news nationwide, but the 1983 El Niño also caused extensive worldwide damage. Trade winds in the Pacific stopped and then reversed. Indonesia and parts of Africa experienced extreme drought, followed by deadly dust storms and massive wildfires. Parts of Peru received record rainfall—as much as 11 feet (132 inches)—in areas that rarely receive more than a few inches in a normal year. The only continents to escape the extremes of drought and flood that year were Europe and Antarctica.
Perhaps the strangest impact of the El Niño of 1983 was recorded by a pair of scientists at Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc, a research and development facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Climate scientists David Salstein and Richard Rosten found that changes in the jet stream and trade winds caused the entire planet to shift by 0.02 milliseconds. The first time that a weather phenomenon was demonstrated to have the power to alter the angular momentum of Earth.
As many as 2,000 people died in storms and flooding that winter. The actual count was probably much higher, because many thousands more experienced extreme hardship in the aftermath. The damage lingered for years. Here in California, the storms changed the coastline, swept billions of tons of sand out to sea, and altered surf breaks. It impacted the state’s fisheries, and even the population of harbor seals, and other marine mammals.
1983 is the year that made the term El Niño a household word. The magnitude of that El Niño resulted in the push for NOAA to develop the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array, an extensive network of moored ocean buoys that monitor ocean conditions.
There have been other strong El Niño years since 1982-83. They include 1997-98, a year when Topanga and Malibu experienced heavy rain and flooding. In Topanga, the creek overflowed its banks behind what is now Cafe on 27, turning Happy Trail into a river that undermined the old Topanga Turnout shopping center, but that was the worst of it. The Topanga Messenger reported that March that Topanga, “just for once…had been spared.”
The winter of 2015-16 was a strong El Niño that didn’t bring heavy rain to Southern California, but it battered the coast with big surf, and brought devastating drought to many parts of the world, along with record high temperatures.
1979-1980 was a “weak” El Niño. Heavy rain triggered landslides that buried PCH under tons of mud and rocks, and ripped out six sections of Topanga Canyon Blvd. and swept Topanga houses and cars down the creek to the sea.
The winter of 2004-2005 was also a weak El Niño. It brought torrential rains that caused a 300-ton boulder to crash down on TCB, burying miles of PCH once again in mud.
El Niño isn’t a disaster guarantee, but it does greatly increase the risk of severe weather. A strong El Niño has the potential to greatly impact not just the Pacific but the entire planet, and this year’s El Niño shows every sign of being one of the strongest.
The timing couldn’t be worse for areas impacted by the Palisades Fire. While crews have raced to repair fire damage and shore up infrastructure, Topanga Canyon Boulevard remains vulnerable to landslides, and the loss of hundreds of houses on Pacific Coast Highway leaves miles of the coast road exposed, with nothing between the road and the ocean except the remains of concrete piles and foundations.
NOAA scientists are expressing concerns that sea level rise may cause “an uptick” in flooding in many locations, “even when compared to previous strong El Niños of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998.” That’s not good news for the local coast.
“It usually ends up being a double whammy,” stated NOAA oceanographer and high tide flooding expert William Sweet, Ph.D. in a press release. “The first punch is decades of sea level rise, which has waters close to the brim in many coastal communities. And now with this second punch—a strong El Niño—coastal communities face more frequent, deeper and widespread high tide flooding along both the West and East Coasts.”
The winter of 1983 was bad. This winter? It may be worse, or maybe not, but it couldn’t hurt to get ready.
