Communities along Pacific Northwest shorelines could face severe coastal flooding in November, December, and January as potentially record-breaking El Ni\u00f1o conditions arrive on top of the year\u2019s highest tides, known as king tides.<\/p>\n
Some Washington cities are stepping up their efforts to prepare for higher seas in advance of king-tide season.<\/p>\n
The city of Stanwood is finishing emergency repairs to a crumbling dike that protects much of the city from high tides on Puget Sound.<\/p>\n
In the oceanfront village of Taholah on the Olympic Peninsula, Quinault Indian Nation officials were set to break ground on a new \u201cNortheast Neighborhood\u201d on Thursday. They expect to let residents of four of the village\u2019s lowest-lying homes move into modular homes on higher ground this autumn, a major milestone in the tribe\u2019s decade-long effort to relocate its main village away from rising seas and tsunamis.<\/p>\n
\u201cReally, I\u2019m haunted every king tide season. I just don\u2019t want them to be there any longer,\u201d Quinault official Alyssa Johnston said of the most vulnerable homes. Johnston, who heads the village relocation project, said the tribe plans to build another 18 upland homes in 2027.<\/p>\n
\u201cBasically, those of us on First Street should be moved this fall,\u201d Taholah resident Lia Frenchman said by email. Her modular home sits on cement blocks next to a seawall that is occasionally overtopped by waves. <\/p>\n
\u201cI had been talking with the team, too, regarding the weather this fall,” she added. “I was getting nervous!\u201d<\/p>\n
Record-breaking El Ni\u00f1o<\/p>\n
The weather phenomenon known as El Ni\u00f1o has been heating up a large swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean, with the sea surface off South America getting warmer than researchers have seen in 150 years of record-keeping.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s been so strong so early in the season,\u201d Washington deputy state climatologist Karin Bumbaco said.<\/p>\n
The record-breaking El Ni\u00f1o has not affected the Pacific Northwest much yet, but scientists say it\u2019s about to.<\/p>\n
Centuries ago, Peruvian mariners noticed a warm current, associated with poor fish catches, that typically peaked in December and named it El Ni\u00f1o (\u201cthe Christ Child\u201d). The natural phenomenon weakens trade winds, reduces upwelling of cold, deep seawater, and raises water temperatures.<\/p>\n
But what happens off Peru doesn\u2019t stay off Peru: El Ni\u00f1o belches ocean heat into the atmosphere and alters weather all around the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat extra heat contributes to many of the climate and weather extremes around the world that we can expect,\u201d University of Washington oceanographer Mike McPhaden said. \u201cExtreme flooding, extreme droughts, extremes in storminess.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Pacific Northwest can expect the coming winter to worsen its multiyear drought. For years, low snowpack has been hurting hydropower production, farming, and salmon streams, each of which rely on melting mountain snow for water through the Northwest\u2019s dry summer months.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u200aWe should expect that our winter, broadly speaking, will be warmer than usual by just a few degrees, but that makes a big difference,\u201d McPhaden said. \u201cIn our neck of the woods, precipitation will more likely fall as rain, particularly in the higher elevations, rather than snow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rising waters<\/p>\n
When liquids get warmer, they expand. Climate change has lifted global sea levels by an average of nine inches since 1880. El Ni\u00f1o can temporarily raise sea levels a comparable amount, both by heating seawater and by weakening east-to-west oceanic winds, effectively letting the Pacific Ocean slosh up more toward the West Coast of the Americas.<\/p>\n
Together, climate change and El Ni\u00f1o could bring record high sea levels, depending on the timing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is sort of a perfect storm, creating a really severe potential hazard for coastal erosion,\u201d McPhaden said.<\/p>\n
Some cities will have to make do without the structural fixes of the type seen in Stanwood and Taholah, which can be years in the making.<\/p>\n
Hoquiam will have to face this winter\u2019s El Ni\u00f1o without a protective levee that the city has been hoping to build since 2015, when floods devastated the area.<\/p>\n
Funding for the work was delayed when the Trump administration canceled the Federal Emergency Management Administration\u2019s disaster-prevention grants program, called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, in April 2025. The agency called the program wasteful, ineffective, and politicized.<\/p>\n
A federal judge in December ordered the administration to restore the program, and in September, Hoquiam received $35 million. Construction is now set to start in spring of 2027, after king-tide season has passed.<\/p>\n
In Seattle\u2019s South Park neighborhood, community leaders expect a long-term fix for flooding there to take another six years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know for sure that until 2032, we will have the sandbagging as a solution,\u201d said Paulina Lopez, head of the Duwamish River Community Coalition.<\/p>\n
This winter, South Park plans to rely for a fourth year on a temporary wall of sandbags to keep high Duwamish River waters out of nearby homes. The waterproof wall blocks access to some businesses, so it is put up temporarily each year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt can’t be just left in place all the time,\u201d Lopez said.<\/p>\n
Seattle officials plan to assemble the sandbag wall in November, before the first king tides arrive.<\/p>\n
A survey of South Park residents found they favored \u201cnature-based solutions\u201d to flooding like flood-absorbing wetlands and green roofs, rather than hard structures like sea walls.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe community didn’t want to see concrete walls,\u201d she said. \u201cDefinitely not. Because of who we are as a community, lacking of green spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unlike storms or droughts, the most dangerous times for tidal flooding are knowable months or years in advance, making them easier to plan for.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe good news with that is that we know when the tides are coming. So that’s very predictable,\u201d Bumbaco said.<\/p>\n
Double whammy<\/p>\n
El Ni\u00f1o has arrived on a planet already abnormally warm due to pollution-caused climate change.<\/p>\n
Scientists expect the world to break records, yet again, for the warmest year ever, if not in 2026, then in 2027.<\/p>\n
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann likened this El Ni\u00f1o to a wave on top of a wave.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat this El Ni\u00f1o event will give us is a glimpse of what our future will look like permanently if we fail to reduce carbon emissions and stop the continued warming of the planet,\u201d Mann told the BBC.<\/p>\n
That glimpse could be deadly, according to researchers at the University of Chicago. They estimated<\/a> that extreme heat from the 2026-2027 El Ni\u00f1o would kill 451,000 people, mostly in Africa and Asia, but including 3,500 in the United States.<\/p>\n The 2026 El Ni\u00f1o is expected to bring a 44% increase in extremely hot days, generating conditions expected 20 years from now as the planet overheats beneath a blanket of heat-trapping fossil-fuel pollution.<\/p>\n \u201cEl Ni\u00f1o is effectively pushing us into the future \u2014 exposing us to temperatures that won\u2019t be the norm for another two decades \u2014 before we have time to adapt and protect ourselves,\u201d the University of Chicago researchers wrote.<\/p>\n One silver lining to the potentially dire consequences: El Ni\u00f1o has squashed hurricane formation in the Atlantic Ocean. No Atlantic hurricanes have formed to date in 2026, unlike any year since 1914. But powerful hurricanes are forming in the Pacific, threatening Hawaii and parts of Mexico.<\/p>\n Marine biologists say parts of the Pacific Ocean could turn into a food desert for wildlife, with lowered productivity of plankton making nutrients hard to find for larger organisms like seabirds and salmon.<\/p>\n \u201cThey’re in a warmer environment, and then they have to eat more, but what they’re eating has a lower caloric content,\u201d Oregon State University biologist\u00a0Rachael Orben said. \u201cThe impacts of a really strong El Ni\u00f1o might last for multiple years.\u201d<\/p>\n While warmer waters are almost always bad news for cold-water fish like salmon, they often bring warm-water creatures with them. A fisherman 40 miles off of Westport caught an 8-foot striped marlin in September, a rare enough feat that the Chinook Observer called it \u201cthe catch of a lifetime.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Communities along Pacific Northwest shorelines could face severe coastal flooding in November, December, and January as potentially record-breaking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":867296,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-867295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/867296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}