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Tropical Storm Rachel Floods Southern California's Coast: What It Means for the Blue Economy

Rachel's swells, on top of already high sea levels, flooded homes and streets on the Long Beach and Balboa peninsulas and closed Newport Beach's piers. Here is what we know, and what we are watching.

CK Economics Research · October 12, 2026 · 7 min read

ArchivePublished before CK Economics turned to global trade on October 16, 2026. Kept here so links to it keep working.

Image: CSU/CIRA & NOAA (GOES-West GeoColor via NOAA/NESDIS/STAR)

Tropical Storm Rachel never made landfall in California. A hurricane earlier in its life, it came ashore in northern Baja California on Saturday night, Oct. 10, as a post-tropical storm. Even so, its swells flooded homes and streets along the Southern California coast, arriving on top of sea levels that were already unusually high. They also hit a shoreline that had not recovered from the last storm: in early September, swells from Hurricane Marie stripped away the sand protecting the bulkhead on Long Beach's Alamitos Peninsula, often called the Long Beach Peninsula.

On Saturday, the National Weather Service had a coastal flood warning in place for beaches from Malibu to San Diego. On Sunday afternoon it eased this to a coastal flood advisory through 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 13, warning of minor to moderate flooding near high tide in Los Angeles County and minor flooding in Orange and San Diego counties.

Homes flooded in Long Beach and Newport Beach

Long Beach. Overnight and into Friday morning's high tide on Oct. 9, waves topped the bulkhead on the Peninsula, flooding homes and streets and damaging the boardwalk. The city ordered a mandatory evacuation of homes on Seaside Walk between 64th and 66th Places, from 7 p.m. Friday through noon Tuesday, a return date it says may change. By Friday evening, the city said, inspectors had red-tagged eight buildings (13 addresses) as unsafe to enter and yellow-tagged one, up from two red tags earlier that day. The tags are preliminary. The same street was evacuated in early September, when Marie's swells put about 20 homes under evacuation orders.

Newport Beach. Seawater began flooding streets on the Balboa Peninsula on Thursday night. By Friday it covered 15 to 20 blocks, by the estimate of the city's utilities director, was knee-high in places and reached some homes near Balboa Boulevard. The city declared a local emergency on Friday. City beaches remain open, but the Newport and Balboa piers, the Wedge and the Balboa Pier parking lot are closed, and lifeguards are urging people to stay out of the ocean. Crews are rebuilding sand berms, opening tide valves and running pumps. The city warns these measures "cannot eliminate all flood risks."

Elsewhere on the coast. Huntington Beach activated its emergency operations center on Friday, when a stretch of the trail at Bolsa Chica State Beach flooded. On Sunday, Seal Beach closed its beach parking lots, and Laguna Beach, Huntington Beach and San Clemente handed out sandbags.

Flooded streets on the Balboa Peninsula, Newport Beach, Friday, Oct. 9, including AIR7 aerial footage; the reporter is at 18th Street and Balboa Boulevard. Video: ABC7 Los Angeles.

Why the water is so high

Rachel's swells did not cause the flooding alone. They arrived on top of:

  • a Kelvin wave, a pulse of warm water linked to the strengthening El Niño, which has been raising sea levels along the coast;
  • a run of very high tides, which peaked on Sunday morning and stay high on Monday and Tuesday mornings.

On Saturday evening, the National Hurricane Center said water levels were running as much as 1.5 feet above predictions. UC climate scientist Daniel Swain said the event was made possible by an early-arriving low-pressure trough coinciding with record-warm ocean temperatures off California.

Inland, thunderstorms in Rachel's outer bands produced wind gusts above 60 mph in Temecula and Menifee on Saturday, with up to 1 to 2 inches of rain. Parts of Southern California and the desert Southwest were under a level 3 of 4 risk of flash flooding.

Satellite image of Tropical Storm Rachel over the Pacific west of Baja CaliforniaRachel over the open Pacific about a day and a half before it reached Baja California, October 9, 2026, 20:00 UTC. Image: CSU/CIRA & NOAA (GOES-West GeoColor via NOAA/NESDIS/STAR).

What it means for the blue economy

It is too early to estimate the cost of the damage, and we will not guess. These are the effects we are watching:

  • Repeat losses. The same few blocks of Seaside Walk have now been hit by two storms about five weeks apart. Before Rachel, Long Beach expected Marie's repairs to cost about $1.5 million, paid from its Tidelands Emergency Reserve, and officials put a full restoration of the Peninsula at $150 million to $350 million. Rachel adds to the repair bill. In our view, repeated damage on the same lots also sharpens the question of whether to keep rebuilding defenses there.
  • Who pays for damaged homes. Standard homeowners policies exclude flood, so recovery will depend largely on whether owners carry flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program or a private policy. One industry estimate puts flood-insurance take-up among California homes at just 1.4%.
  • Beaches as economic assets. Newport Beach's pier closures and the warnings to stay out of the water came over the Columbus Day federal holiday weekend in October, outside the summer peak. The longer-lasting cost is the sand itself, which the storms have stripped from the most exposed beaches. Where rain is heavy enough to trigger them, ocean-water advisories in Los Angeles County stay in effect for 72 hours after the rain ends.
  • Public infrastructure and emergency costs. The Peninsula's decades-old bulkhead in Long Beach, and Newport's tide valves and pumps, show how much of the coast depends on engineered defenses. A local emergency proclamation, like Newport Beach's, is the first step toward state help with repairing public property under the California Disaster Assistance Act. State reimbursement of response costs requires a state emergency proclaimed by the governor, and federal aid requires a presidential disaster declaration.
  • Ports and trade. We found no closure announcements from the Port of Los Angeles or the Port of Long Beach as of Sunday evening. Any effect on October container volumes will be hard to separate from other factors, such as shifts in import timing, so we will also watch the weekly count of containerships waiting at San Pedro Bay. Both series are on our port data page.

What comes next

The weather service expects coastal flooding near high tide through Tuesday afternoon. Beyond that, the El Niño that made this event worse is still strengthening: NOAA expects a strong to very strong El Niño through early 2027. Kelvin waves from El Niño are expected to keep raising water levels along the coast into the winter, and the year's highest tides, the king tides, arrive in November, December and January. We are preparing a full analysis of Rachel's economic effects on Southern California's coastal economy and will publish it soon.

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Cite this insight

CK Economics Research. (2026, October 12). Tropical Storm Rachel Floods Southern California's Coast: What It Means for the Blue Economy. Conkling & Kopcik Economics. https://www.ckeconomics.com/research/insights/tropical-storm-rachel-floods-southern-california-s-coast-what-it-means-for-the-blue-economy

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