Hey Back Bay Berms, happy Friday!

…or maybe the Peninsula is catching too many breaks. While the king tides are having their way with our sea walls and sand berms, we have to wonder if the real haunted house is just a trunk-or-treat during cold season.

To our new readers—welcome! The Back Bay Buzz delivers just the right amount of news and events for locals in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. No crime, no politics, no spam—just the good stuff. We scan newspapers, blogs, social media, business journals, and Google alerts so you don’t have to.

In today’s Buzz:

— Jon Dougher, Publisher, Back Bay Buzz

It felt like you needed a paddleboard just to grab your morning coffee on the Peninsula this week. Newport Beach just got walloped by a historic 8.4-foot king tide amplified by an El Niño Kelvin wave that pushed local ocean levels nearly two feet above predictions. Across town, seawater submerged private docks on Balboa Island, swamped the Fun Zone, put Lido Park Drive near the Rhine Channel and the Cannery under two feet of water, and flooded West Newport around 33rd and 35th Streets (where fire crews even had to cut power near the beloved Pirate House).

While City Hall has rolled out expedited in-person permitting at newportbeachca.gov/floodrecovery for damaged homes and seawalls—and public works crews are wrapping sandbags in plastic sheeting to hold the line—this was really a massive macro event up and down the Southern California coast. From Long Beach’s battered Belmont Shore to San Diego’s flooded West Harbor Drive, the ocean has been relentless, even shutting down PCH between Seal Beach and Huntington Beach while locals literally kayaked down swamped streets in Huntington Harbour and Sunset Beach and lifeguards rescued stranded drivers.

Down south between Newport and Laguna Beach near El Morro, the relentless surge and high tides opened up a 360-foot-long, two-foot-wide crack under PCH, pinching a corridor that handles 32,000 cars a day down to a single lane in each direction and turning coastal traffic into a parking lot. The situation got so dicey that Governor Gavin Newsom dropped into Orange County on Tuesday to sign an emergency executive order, backed by $4 million in Caltrans funding to tarp the bluff and build a rock buttress at the base of the slope during low-tide windows. And don't ditch those sandbags just yet: oceanographers warn that because we’re hitting the peak of both 18.6-year and 4.4-year lunar tidal cycles, even gnarlier king tides are on the books for November 24–26, December 23–25, and January 21–22—meaning if a winter storm lines up with those dates, this week might have just been the dress rehearsal.

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🌊 Water temp = 73º
Suit Rec: Summer suit

Thanks! Please ignore any typos, our editor went to a trunk-or-treat during cold season…

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