‘It’s quite shocking’: Waves are battering Long Beach’s peninsula. It’s about to get worse – Los Angeles Times

‘It’s quite shocking’: Waves are battering Long Beach’s peninsula. It’s about to get worse  Los Angeles Times

Long Beach's peninsula is a narrow spit of land that juts out between Alamitos Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Over the years, its tiny beach cottages were replaced by multistory homes and apartments with sweeping views of the water. It can seem a precarious spot. But Long Beach residents have long felt protected from the storms of the ocean by a vast breakwater constructed about 80 years ago to give the Navy safe harbor close to shore. The breakwater now serves as protection for Long Beach harbor, one of the largest ports in the world. Except there is a weakness. When it was constructed, the breakwater was built far enough east to protect the shore from waves coming from the west, but left a gap that allowed waves coming from the south to hit a narrow stretch of Long Beach's Alamitos Peninsula.

That means that in the summer, when tropical storms whip up winds and waves traveling north, a small stretch of the peninsula gets the full brunt of those waves. The result has left the peninsula vulnerable to the fury of El Niño. Several homes facing the Pacific are being broken apart by months of high surf and powerful waves. The historic wooden boardwalk has splintered. And residents and city officials fear things will get a lot worse as