Tidal Overflow

[kimbottles]

Don’t believe in climate change?
Explain this:

[BeauV]

WOW!! Down here we had the river that runs through Santa Cruz back up badly with a high tide and a near-record rain storm. Quite a mess! The levee held, but only just. Another 8" and about 30 city blocks would have been under about 8 feet of water.

[H B]

The flood pic was in October..I jacked my project car a full foot up in the air on jackstands. If the car floods it will be trashed. As long as it's not flooded, it is just waiting on some TLC. The water made it higher than this pic, all the way to the bottom of the door sills, but did not get in. The neighbor's house is built to the 100 year flood plain, and he had some water in the garage..but did not get in his cars either..all my other cars were moved to higher ground well before the flooding got to us.
The low water pic was this week is around the corner and up the street. Normal high tide is about half way up the seawall. When the tide was up really high, it was over the top of the sea wall (and lifted some of the poorly attached bulkhead timbers), and covered the lower pier in the foreground. However, on the windward side of the island sea water was crashing over the seawall and due to multiple factors is what caused the flood:
East Coast storm (unnamed, but probably hurricane force out in the Atlantic, kinda one of those "Perfect Storm" scenarios), with 35-40 knots blowing easterlies, no chance for the tide to recede
Rain - a few inches in a short period..our drainage system cannot handle even 1 inch per hour of rain
35 knot easterlies plus high tide allowed the seas to crash over the seawall which then fills up the fishbowl which is the area of the flood
Inadequate draining available in the fishbowl. One 12" pipe is simply not enough, and when the tide is 4 feet+ above MLLW the pipe is under water and won't drain uphill.

I guess then the tides were loading up on the East Coast in Oct, and this last week in Jan our tide is well below predicted levels. Guess it has shifted over to the West Coast where you are Kim.

Although not unheard of, since moving to a house that is 4' above sea level, tides and storms are certainly something I pay more attention to than before. Good ol' Larry had it to a science, he had the 'normal' tide range here calculated to I think 14 inches. The high mark in October was something like 4.8 feet above MLLW (peak of the flood, and that was a tide measurement, not the additional flooding conditions we experienced in our local fishbowl where my entire yard was flooded and 10 inches of water in the lower level workshop and my crawlspace half full), and the low tide this week (negative) -0.7 feet MLLW. These two extremes are 6 FEET.
Anyway, the project car survived, but I need to get it running so I can drive it to high ground when the next event comes 'round, and I am with you on climate change being real. I am not sure how many issues there where before we moved, but we have had the road flood at least once per season, and sometimes twice during the spring king tides too.

[Olaf Hart]

I will have to start on the wharf at the bottom of our boundary, it’s just over the road from the shore…