DON'T MAKE WAVES

In Quentin Tarantino's novelization of "Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood," the auteur/author laid down a detailed backstory for Sharon Tate, from obscure Texas to infamous tragedian. 

A "silly comedy" is how QT summed up one of Tate's first roles — as a bitchin' beach babe named Malibu — in the 1967 bedromp "Don't Make Waves." The movie also starred Claudia Cardinale, Tony Curtis and muscleman Dave Draper (with a guest cameo by Mr. Magoo) in what was an attempt to cash in on the "waxploitation” Beach Party/Muscle Beach movies starring Frankie and Annette.

QT knows cinema: "Don't Make Waves" is silly and the comedy has layers, but it should be required viewing for all Malibu citizens, as there are recognizable places and even faces — and maybe a scary prophecy of what is coming this winter.

Modern Malibuites will find it comic when 1967 citizens cringe at the thought of paying $100,000 for oceanfront property. That $100,000 translates to 2026$1,000,000 or so in modern dollars — but still... "Don't Make Waves" is a screwball love triangle that is Malibucentric in a lot of ways, especially the ending, when a Biblical rainstorm liquefies the cliffs over PCH into goo, dislodges a precariously perched precipice palace, and sends it tumbling down PCH with its inhabitants tumbling along with it, hanging on for dear life.

One man's comedy is another's threatening nightmare. By 1967 Malibu was known for a lot of things: surfers, Kennedy and Monroe, swimming fools, movie stars, earth, wind, fire and rain. Malibu has a long history of violent mudslides destroying houses, sparking lawsuits, killing people and blocking PCH. But what was comedy in 1967 is a looming tragedy for 2026/2027. With those unstable hills stripped bare by fire — exposed and vulnerable — there is a potential menace: a potentially record-breaking El Niño is bubbling over the horizon and along the equator right now. Something wicked this way comes, but it's too early to predict what effect this will have on the world, California, and specifically exposed, vulnerable Malibu — a quiet coastal community already plagued by veils of troubles.

PECULIAR THINGS

"I don't mind when peculiar things happen. 

It's natural… because the world is a peculiar place."

    -   Michelle Pfeiffer as Sukie Ridgemont in Witches of Eastwick (1987)

Surfers are like Sukie character as they quietly cheer for peculiarities in the ocean and weather, because atmospheric and oceanic looniness can produce recreational and endorphinspiring opportunities for surfers and ocean people to get their fix and their kicks.

Meanwhile, Malibu homeowners clutching their pearls and insurance policies up in the vulnerable fire-stripped hills — or along a Pacific Coast Highway that's being gobbled up by the Pacific — are wondering just how bad this El Niño will be.

Who you gonna consult?

Mark Sponsler!!!!!

WWW.STORMSURF.COM

NorCalian Mark Sponsler (www.stormsurf.com) is the unofficial but respected/worshipped surf forecaster at Mavericks and points north. When I have questions about weather, the ocean, currents, trends, data, history, I go to Mark Sponsler. He knows his stuff, but is he educated or a hobbyist with PhD-level experiential insight? 

"Yeah, I'm one of those surfers with a nerdy penchant for weather and specifically weather data and have been tracking surf-producing storms since 1967," Sponsler said. "I worked in the IT industry and used that knowledge to start Stormsurf in 1996, and haven't stopped since. If you are curious, and watch weather charts day after day and year after year, you'd be shocked at how much knowledge one can accumulate."

Which makes sense, because a lot of surfers who live and die by what the ocean is doing are tuned into buoy reports, swell direction, wind inputs, and know how to compute it, figure out what's coming, and drop everything — or at least had to before Surfline and all the surf forecasting websites did the thinking and prophesizing for us.

But because surfers are as weather-reliant-andtuned as farmers, pilots, fishermen, skiers and wildland firefighters, when know-nothing nabobs poo-poo climate change, global warming and sea level rise, I retort: "If you grew up on the Pacific Coast of North America — especially if you are a surfer, diver, sailboarder, standup paddler, foiler or sailor — and you know the ocean as well as you know yourself — there's no question things are screwy. And these changes aren't happening over centuries or millennia, they're happening year to year."

PIER KILLING SWELLS, WHITE SHARKS AND SEA TURTLES — OH MY!

How screwy? Well, Santa Cruz had two brutal back-to-back stormy winters that destroyed and/or badly damaged three landmark piers. 

In January 2023, a bomb cyclone split the Capitola Wharf clean in half and finished off the historic pier at Seacliff State Beach that had connected the shore to the old cement ship, the SS Palo Alto, since 1930.

THREE FALL INTO THE SEA: SEACLIFF, CAPITOLA, SANTA CRUZ WHARF

Then on December 23, 2024, one of the most powerful raw groundswells anyone had ever seen or surfed rolled through North Central California, creating a historic day at Mavericks — some are calling Luca Padua and Alo Slebir's wave that day the biggest ever surfed, with estimates near 80 feet. 

"That day wasn't just huge," Luca said. "It was pumping. Nonstop, all day. That wave we caught, the wall went from the Marine Reserve to the Ritz Carlton." 

That same raw groundswell swept south and down into Monterey Bay, tore off a 150-foot chunk of the Santa Cruz Wharf, sank boats and wrecked docks in the upper harbor, and did damage officials compared to the 2011 Japan tsunami.

Raw, long-traveled North Pacific swell on a clear day. Not storm swell. Friends of mine who have lived in Santa Cruz all their lives and had seen it all had never seen its equal: a supercharged, wharf-collapsing, upper-harbor-invading swell. 

But supercharged by what?

MALIBU PIER CLOSED AT THE END

Just weeks later, in January 2025, California State Parks quietly closed the end of Malibu Pier after its own structural assessment turned up concerning findings — and it's stayed closed ever since, with no repair timeline or funding source yet identified.

The Santa Cruz wharf collapse splashed two startled (and rescued) workers, some heavy equipment and a bathroom into the briny. But imagine if a beloved Malibu restaurant and gift shop full of people, and all those fishermen and kids, collapsed into the water all at once.

No bueno. Closed until further notice.

ROCKHOLD LOBSTER!

During the 1982/1983 El Niño, NorCal sport fishermen were jazzed/shocked to catch sailfish off the Farallon Islands, bonito in the San Francisco Bay and barracuda in Monterey Bay.

More recently, those screwy peculiarities some say are a myth may have caused other NorCal anomalies: Matt Rockhold, the Santa Cruz commercial fisherman and former pro surfer whose crab-trap TikToks have racked up over a million followers, was surprised and delighted to haul up a Pacific lobster in his trap.

He gave it a snack and dropped it back.

And on November 20, 2025, a green sea turtle — a species that has no business being anywhere near Monterey — was filmed cruising past Municipal Wharf No. 2 by local resident Rich Pena. Was Mr. Green an escapee from the Monterey Bay Aquarium? No, it was one very lost green sea turtle that followed the warm water north.

Execs from Disney tried to find the turtle to option its life rights, but it was gone.

White sharks prefer water temperatures between 50 and 60 degrees, and warming oceans might explain why there is now a “shiver” of 20 or more white sharks in the 13.5 miles between Moss Landing and New Brighton Beach in Monterey Bay — clearly visible with drones and from whale-watching and fishing boats.

In SoCal terms, that's the equivalent of 20+ white sharks clearly visible in the Santa Monica Bay in the 15 miles from Redondo Beach to Sunset — or how about 20+ white sharks lurking between Point Dume and Sunset?

Fun! Peculiar!

ARE GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE FOR REAL?

Asked for his experiential opinion on whether global warming and climate change are a clear and present danger, or the liberal-paranoid hysteria version of Chemtrails and 15 Minute Cities and UFOs, Sponsler didn't hedge: "I get asked this all the time — what evidence is there of global warming? The answer: there is a clear signal that the planet's oceans are warming, starting in the late 70s/early 80s.

"The oceans have warmed enough that today, what is considered normal water temps down in the equatorial Pacific would have been a minimal El Niño in 1980 (about 0.5 deg C or 0.9 deg F). NOAA established what was an average normal sea surface temp to then compare current temperature against, to then determine if El Niño or La Niña was developing.

"Both can dramatically affect our environment which has very real economic impacts, like variation in precipitation and its effect on crops and livestock. Water temps locally and its effect on fish stocks and commercial fishing. Snowfall and its effect on drinking water level and the recreation industry.

"El Niño and La Niña have a profound impact on humanity, and as the warming signal builds, the strength and duration of El Niños and La Niñas grows with it.

"Another signal is the retreat of glaciers. I'm no glacier expert though."

JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE SEEN IT ALL: NEPAL

Glacial melt. Don't get me star'ed. On August 27, the world woke up to horrific disaster images scarcely to be credited: an inland tsunami careening down mountain river valleys, engulfing vehicles, homes, roads, entire villages. What looked like AI or CGI was disturbingly real. A glacier and rock face high above Nepal's Bhote Koshi river gave way — estimates vary from about 14 million to as much as 200 million cubic meters of rock and ice, weighing somewhere between roughly 32 million and half a billion metric tons — and the ice-and-rock avalanche slammed into a tributary called the Lhende Khola and dammed it on the spot. The water, ice and debris that piled up behind that new, improvised dam broke loose in a single violent pulse.

An estimated 20 million cubic meters of water — roughly 5.3 billion gallons, twice the capacity of Lake Hollywood and about 28 times the full original capacity of Malibu's own Rindge Dam — tore down the valley, raising the river 30 feet in half an hour and hitting a peak flow of nearly 1.5 million gallons per second downstream. A scientist at the Planetary Science Institute calculated that the wrong-way tsunami — a mix of water, pulverized ice, and rock — covered its first 22 kilometers at an average speed of 193 kilometers per hour, or about 120 mph, meaning it traveled nearly 14 miles in under seven minutes. It wasn't a lake bursting so much as a mountain collapsing into a river and letting go all at once — an inland tsunami.

As of Monday morning, August 31, the confirmed death toll stood at 919 (903 in Nepal, 16 in China), with more than 4,700 still missing (4,247 in Nepal, 546 in China) — including 592 foreign nationals, among them at least 85 Americans.

A stunning peculiarity of climate change and global warming? Maybe.

SOUTH OF THE POINT CONCEPTION LINE

Down below the Point Conception line, water temperatures have been running some of the warmest in Scripps Institution of Oceanography's 110-year record at La Jolla. On August 28, the Instagram channel us_stormwatch proclaimed: "SAN DIEGO COUNTY BUOY HITS 80°F, HISTORIC WARMTH FOR SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WATERS" — a sea-surface reading of 80.2°F recorded less than 10 miles off San Onofre Beach, as a severe marine heatwave fuels historically humid conditions across SoCal this week.

People have long called San Onofre "the Waikiki of California," and 80-degree water helps that claim. In 2026 alone, 36 days between January and April set all-time highs for their calendar date.

Warmer water has been very good to Pacific bluefin this summer — the temperature breaks created where warm currents pushing up from Baja collide with the cooler California Current concentrate baitfish, and the bluefin follow them in closer to shore than usual. The numbers back it up: the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission raised bluefin catch limits by nearly 80 percent for the 2025–2026 season on the strength of the species' comeback, and in just the week ending July 26, 2026, California boats landed over 2,000 bluefin — the kind of volume anglers are calling the best SoCal bluefin fishing in 30 years. Yum. Bluefin taste good.

SNOW CRAB MELTED, SALMON SCRAMMED, DUNGENESS DELAYED

But warm water isn't a blessing everywhere. Ask Alaska's crab fishermen, California's salmon fleet, or the state's own Dungeness crabbers.

In the Bering Sea, more than 10 billion snow crabs vanished between 2018 and 2021 — an 84 percent population collapse — as marine heat waves spiked the crabs' metabolism just as warming disrupted their food web, and they essentially starved. Alaska canceled the snow crab harvest in 2022 and again in 2023 — the first cancellations in the fishery's history. Industry estimates put direct revenue losses as high as $500 million, with a more conservative federal tally at $287.7 million, and nearly 7,000 Alaska fishing jobs disappeared over those two years — hitting the town of St. Paul, home to the region's only crab processing plant, hard enough that it lost 60 percent of its municipal tax revenue and formally declared a cultural, economic and social emergency.

Closer to home, California's own salmon industry just came out of a brutal three-year stretch — commercial and recreational seasons shut down entirely in 2023 and 2024, with only six open recreational days in all of 2025, as drought and warming rivers hammered Sacramento and Klamath River Chinook runs. California's salmon industry is normally worth $1.4 billion in economic activity and 23,000 jobs a year; the 2023 closure alone is estimated to have cost $45–65 million, and recreational salmon trips collapsed from nearly 99,000 in 2022 to zero the following year, with roughly half the fishing fleet forced to take shore jobs, some of them for good. Federal disaster relief eventually covered $20.6 million of the losses — far short of what fishermen say they needed, and much of it arriving more than a year late. Some years, NOAA officials reported losing 90–95 percent of endangered winter-run Chinook eggs in the Sacramento because the water simply got too warm for them to survive. The season only reopened in 2026, after river conditions and dam removal finally allowed Chinook numbers to rebound.

Warm water has hit Dungeness crab too — fueling the harmful algal blooms that produce domoic acid, a neurotoxin that makes crab meat unsafe to eat. Northern California's commercial season was delayed into mid-January this past year over exactly that, and state officials are already bracing for a rough 2026–27 season, with one calling the developing domoic acid situation "a biggie" on par with a devastating bloom a decade ago.

So the same warm water padding bluefin trip logs from San Diego to the Bay Area is starving crabs in the Bering Sea, cooking salmon eggs in the Sacramento, and poisoning Dungeness crab meat. It depends entirely on which species, and which threshold, you're talking about.

MALIBU HAMMERHEAD

Around Malibu, a hammerhead shark cruising past the Malibu Pier on August 13, 2026 was the first sighting that close to Southern California beaches in over a decade. That certainly counts as alarmingly out of the ordinary, as does the ongoing coastal erosion that shut down Westward Beach Road indefinitely and is chewing away at the Malibu coastline like mice nibbling the wires on your Koenigsegg. The erosion has been made worse by the January 2025 Palisades Fire — many of the seawalls that used to buffer that stretch belonged to homes that burned down, leaving nothing between the surf and the bluffs.

Surfers delight. Homeowners fright.

IT’S NOT ALL BAD: BOOKOO BLUEFIN BONANZA!

Like surfers and Sukie Ridgemont, offshore fishermen along the Pacific Coast don't mind it when peculiar things happen. And this year's peculiarity has a name: El Niño, stacked on top of a marine heatwave that's been building since 2025, has shoved unusually warm water up the coast and dragged the best eatin' fish on the planet — bluefin tuna — along with it. Normally those fish stay south, off Baja, because Southern California water runs too cold for them. Not this year. Offshore temperatures hit 67.4 degrees by spring — a reading you'd expect in July, not April — and bluefin were stacking up on the offshore banks by mid-May, a month or two ahead of schedule. NOAA didn't even make it official until June 11, and forecasters now say this El Niño could turn into one of the strongest ever recorded by the time it peaks this winter — meaning the fish may not be done arriving.

Charter boats have been coming in with clients giddy because everyone aboard hit their limit, and the size of the fish just kept climbing. It started with Floyd Sparks landing a 395-pound bluefin out of Los Angeles on Tanner Bank on Sept. 9 — a new state record. It didn't last the week. On Sept. 16, Captain Ryan Stahl, running the Game Changer out of San Diego, boated a 420-pound bluefin on a lure called a Delta Flyer, breaking Sparks' week-old record before the ink dried.

There were bigger fish in the water — a Shearwater Fishing angler named Markus Medak brought in a 446-pound bluefin some outlets crowned a rod-and-reel "world record," and a commercially-caught 500-pounder got disqualified on a technicality — but Stahl's 420 is the one that counts.

And the bluefin weren't alone: the very next day, Sept. 15, Captain Alec Stockfelt hauled in a 648-pound blue marlin 40 miles off San Diego, the biggest fish ever weighed at Fishermen's Landing, while up in Washington a 21-year-old striped marlin record fell by 17 pounds.

How could that be? Warm water, hungry fish, and a lot of very lucky charter clients.

Bust out the sesame seeds and start the BBQ!!!!

IT’S A WHALE! IT’S A SHARK! IT’S A WHALE! IT’S A SHARK!

IT’S BOTH!!!!!!!!

And the peculiarities just keep on coming.

On September 9, a commercial fishing spotter pilot named Carl Sbarounis got a tip from a friend, Ryder DeVoe, about something drifting in the water 30 miles off the coast. Sbarounis flew out and circled it, camera rolling, and found himself looking down at a whale shark — the largest fish species on the planet, a filter-feeding giant that normally sticks to the warm belt of ocean between 30 degrees north and 35 degrees south, favoring water in the 70s and 80s.

This one, 14 to 16 feet long and small by the species' standards, was cruising the water between Malibu and Santa Barbara Island — a spot with no business hosting a fish that usually stays put off Baja California, the Sea of Cortez, or the Philippines.

Sbarounis, who's spotted fish from the air for more than 40 years, said the last one he'd seen in these waters was three years ago.

It's not a coincidence so much as a pattern. The whale shark showed up weeks after a hammerhead was spotted near the Malibu Pier in August, and both sightings track the same marine heatwave and El Niño warming that's been stacking up off the West Coast since early 2026 — the same warm water that's been hauling record-setting bluefin tuna and blue marlin into San Diego. Scientists are careful to say you can't pin any single shark sighting on El Niño alone, since the warming trend got underway before this El Niño officially did. But the broader story checks out: when the water runs this warm this long, the ocean starts sending California guests it doesn't usually invite..

HURRICAE ERIN 2025: NAZARE, MUNDAKA, MULLAGHMORE AND UNSTAD IN AUGUST?

"Legendary" and "iconic" have joined the list of Most Annoying, Overused Words along with "Curated," "Artisanal" and "Cali." But those words applied to Hurricane Erin, the perfect wave-creating storm that spun up the middle of the Atlantic in August of 2025. The only part of it that touched land was perfect hurricane surf from Miami to Nahant to Maine. Then the lovely Erin turned east and created world-class surf from Nazaré in Portugal to Mundaka in the Basque Country and all the way up to Unstad, Norway — the same latitude as Barrow, Alaska.

Craig Sage, owner of Mundaka Surf Shop, said Mundaka was eight feet and grinding and broke 20 boards. In August. Unheard of.

Legendary! Iconic! Do it again!

MAVERICKS IN AUGUST?

So is anything wicked-cool like that coming to the Pacific for fall into winter? Mavericks in September? The Wedge in January? Sponsler says it doesn't look like it, yet: "I was thinking we'd have an early start to the winter surf season. Well no luck," Sponsler sighed. "Though El Niño is coupled with the atmosphere down on the equator, the jetstream in the North Pacific is sound asleep. So for all those tropical systems on the equator, there's literally nothing in place to force them to turn northeast and go extratropical while pushing east over the dateline. This is a complete reversal of what happened in '97. We got a large long-period swell in late September '97.

"Given where the jet is today, I'm not seeing that happening anytime soon. Very strange. The PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) is also indicating a high-pressure regime over the North Pacific. Statistically speaking, that should not be happening."

MEANWHILE, IN THE ATLANTIC: THANKS, MR. PRESIDENT! NO HURRICANES!!!!!

Erin was a one-off miracle. This year, the Atlantic hasn't produced anything worth talking about at all. As of 9/21/2-026, the basin has gone the entire season without a single hurricane — the longest wait for a first Atlantic hurricane in the satellite era, breaking the old record of September 11 (set in both 2002 and 2013). Six named storms have wandered through — Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard and, just recently, Fay — and not one of them has managed to spin up past tropical storm strength.

Has this ever happened before? Almost, but not quite like this. Since World War II, only two other seasons made it through the September peak without a hurricane: 1962 and 1994. Both went on to produce hurricanes anyway before the season ended. If 2026 finishes with zero hurricanes start to finish, it'll be only the third time that's ever happened in the entire modern hurricane record — joining 1914 and 1907. That's 112 years. Colorado State's Phil Klotzbach, who tracks Accumulated Cyclone Energy (a stat combining how many storms form, how strong they get, and how long they last), says this season is running at about 7 percent of a normal year's total — itself a record low going back to 1950.

Naturally, somebody had to take credit. When meteorologist Chris Martz posted about the record-breaking drought and it went viral, the White House's own communications account swooped in and replied: "Thank you, President Trump!" — officially crediting the 47th president with personally shutting down Atlantic hurricane season, an achievement roughly on par with personally stopping the tide. It got picked up and mocked everywhere from the Daily Beast to LGBTQ Nation, and — this being 2026 — it also made the rounds on Facebook pages like Christina Aguayo News, presented with the kind of straight face usually reserved for miracle cures and Nigerian princes.

Here's the joke within the joke: the actual reason the Atlantic is a ghost town is the exact same beast this whole column is about. El Niño's wind shear is choking off hurricane formation over the tropical Atlantic, while that same El Niño pattern is the one about to turbocharge the East Pacific and, if Sponsler's right, dump a historic winter on Malibu's own backyard. Same El Niño, two oceans, opposite outcomes. So if you want to thank someone for the quiet Atlantic, thank a sea-surface-temperature anomaly out by the Galápagos, not the guy in the Rose Garden — and given how this winter is shaping up out here, "thanks, Trump" might turn out to be a joke that ages very badly, very locally, very soon.

TAO BUOYS AND KELVIN WAVES

Asked for specifics on the TAO buoy array/El Niño Early Warning System, Sponsler said: "NOAA and their international partners designed, funded and installed a series of about 50 buoys aligned east to west across the equatorial Pacific used to monitor the development of El Niño. This project was established in response to the devastation caused by the '82-83 El Niño — governments decided we needed an early warning system. The buoys are subgrouped north to south in clusters of three to eight, each with sensors for wind speed, air temperature, surface water temperature, and ocean current, plus sensors strung down many anchor lines measuring subsurface temperature and current at 15 or more levels down — many anchored in water 5,000 feet deep or more."

Claude doesn't surf, but when asked to give the array's dimensions, it put the span at roughly 9°N to 8°S — a narrow band straddling the equator only about 1,170 miles wide — stretching nearly 8,800 miles of longitude from 165°E to 95°W, the equivalent of a line running from Nouméa, New Caledonia to Houston, Texas, and covering the entire width of the tropical Pacific from waters near the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea to the coasts of Ecuador and Peru, with 55 moored buoys strung across that expanse to catch the earliest signs of an El Niño or La Niña taking shape.

What are the buoys actually watching for? Sponsler explained it comes down to Kelvin Waves — eastward-moving pulses of warm water that take about three months to cross the equatorial Pacific before slamming into the Galápagos and Ecuador. "When successive Kelvin Waves transit the Pacific, that demarks the start of El Niño — the development of warm water off Ecuador where normally there is colder water," he said. The waves themselves are triggered by a breakdown or reversal of the trade winds: instead of blowing east to west, the winds flip and start pushing warm water — normally trapped in the far western Pacific — eastward instead. "Once warm water starts erupting off Ecuador, evaporation increases, which in turn starts changing the atmospheric circulation over the East Pacific, which manifests in El Niño during the northern hemisphere winter months."

EL NINOARANOIA

So you can debate global warming and climate change and sea level rise all you want with your clueless inland friends and relations, but there is no question that as we speak, a record-breaking El Niño is gunning its engines down along the equator.

I asked Mark Sponsler if this is all "El Ninoaranoia" or is something extraordinary brewing out there: "I'm expecting the impacts from this year's El Niño to be severe," Sponsler said. "Water temps in the official El Niño monitoring region are forecast to be 3.25 degrees above normal.

"The previous two gold-standard strongest El Niños from past years are 1982-83 and 1997-98. In both those El Niños, temps never exceeded +2.5 degrees above normal. And if you recall, California got hammered in those winters."

Sponsler continued: "And now we're facing an El Niño that is conservatively forecast to be +0.75 degrees warmer, or 30% stronger than the two strongest El Niños in the satellite era. Who knows what came in the eons prior, but we didn't have accurate ways to monitor or measure any of it. In fact, the 82-83 El Niño was the bellwether that caused NOAA and Congress to fund the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) buoy array."

Stay tuned for Part Two.

WE’RE IN FOR A BUMPY WINTER

Since I wrote this for the Entertainment Column of Malibu Times, I started Part Two by paraphrasing Bette Davis in "All About Eve" (1950):

"Hasten your safety precautions, we're in for a bumpy winter."

Apologies for being alarmist during an already-stressful time, but as stated in Part One: something wicked this way comes, in the form of a record-breaking El Niño — and all that implies. Malibu is exposed and vulnerable on either side of PCH, and if there's anything one can do to prepare, protect and prevent — from rain dances to rain gutters — we're quoting Starsky and Hutch's (2004) Maury Finkle, of Finkle Fixtures:

"Do it. Do it."

HURRICANE MARIE REDUX? MAYBE NOT

As Part One went to press last Tuesday, September 1, I tried to insert a caveat coda:

"Stop the presses! There's a system brewing off Baja, moving north like a giant Pac-Man, gobbling up abnormally warm water — potentially strong enough to cross into California as an actual hurricane, something that hasn't happened since 1939. Could this be another Hurricane Marie like 2014, which produced a once-in-a-century — so far — swell that made Surfrider Beach look like Jeffrey's Bay? You like apples? This one is Tropical Storm Marie right now! How you like them apples? Looking like next Monday is M Day. Batten down the hatches and dust off your 7'3"!"

Marie was smack in the middle of this summer's chaotic conga line of tropical storms and hurricanes, supercharged by El Niño-ized water, causing trouble from Westward Beach Road to the Big Island:

In Order of Appearance, where TS = Tropical Storm, H = Hurricane and the # is the intensity.

TS Amanda, TS Boris, TS Cristina, TS Douglas, TS Elida, H4 Fausto, H5 Genevieve, H4 Hernan, H4 Iselle, TS Julio, H4 Karina, H5 Lowell.

And then there's H1–2 Marie, which didn't defy ICE by storming north across the border, but radiated swellegant — if not legendary — surf to Malibu, plus dangerous rip currents and coastal flooding risk from La Jolla to Long Beach to Santa Cruz.

Rain from Marie drenched the Chili Cook Off into a Woodstock-class mess and shut it down Sunday.
After that issue of Malibu Times went to press, Hurricane Marie also kicked up swell that wrecked the home of Nicholas Cage - some say it was punishment for him starring in the movie The Surfer - and that same swell damage red-tagged a couple dozen homes on Lechuza Beach, just west of Broad Beach.

A GALLERY OF HURRICANE MARIE DAMAGE - SEPTEMBER 5 - 9, 2026

FREAKY LABOR DAY WEEKEND

Surfers delight. Homeowners and Caltrans fright. A Malibu Guy Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous (MGWWTRA) described it like this:

"This swell wasn't as big as 2014 Marie, but in a way it was smaller and better. Surfed First Point twice Saturday — good, but my carotid artery was telling me I should wear a helmet. Driving north there was a big, gnarly, Nathan Florence-class left grinding off the other side of Mugu Rock. Paddled out and it was slabbing 8-12 feet off the top, but I was with everyone on the next peak over. Then I surfed a big left at Backside Rincon, in August, with Britt Merrick and all the local hot guys. Now it's Sunday and I'm driving back to Rincon and it's pouring rain in Carpinteria. That's how weird this summer's been. Historic. One of the best I've ever seen, but weird."

MGWWTRA also said he was surprised to see waves breaking up and over the rip rap onto PCH at Thornhill Broome up to Point Mugu — Instagram confirmed it.

HURRICANE LOWELL THREATENS HANALEI

As of Friday, three hurricanes — Lowell, Karina, and Marie — spun across the Pacific simultaneously, the first time that's happened in 11 years, part of a historically supercharged El Niño season. Now, on Labor Day Monday, Hurricane Lowell is threatening Kauai and Niihau, frightening people into whispering She Who Shall Not Be Named: Iniki, which hit Kauai September 11, 1992 as a Category 4 with sustained winds around 145 mph and gusts past 175 mph, causing about $1.8 billion in damage (roughly $2.38 billion today) and several deaths.

The islands had already been waterboarded once, August 15-16, when Hurricane Lala mutated into a Category 4 after brushing the Big Island as a Category 1, dumping up to 43.5 inches of rain, killing one person, and damaging over 100 homes.

Safe to call this an "active Pacific hurricane season" — activated by El Niño.

LESS CLIFF DRIVE

Speaking of erosion: Steamer Lane's cliffs in Santa Cruz collapsed a couple times this summer. June 22, a major failure at "the Slot" takeoff zone dumped rubble into the lineup after weeks of heavy south swells; August 30, another rockfall was filmed by Surfline's camera after days of big waves; two days later, yet another section gave way. All during a south swell — a blessing, since smaller surf lets surfers take off right under those cliffs, which would've put them in deep kimchi and dinged their sticks had the timing been worse.

Coastal and cliff erosion is a clear and present danger up and down the state, particularly around Malibu.

MALIBU AND WESTWARD BEACH ROAD

Malibu's been victimized and blessed all summer by that active hurricane system. South swell energy from H5 Genevieve slammed Point Dume the weekend of Aug. 1-2, partially collapsing the roadbed under Westward Beach Road and cracking a water line beneath it. County officials measured bluff drop-offs approaching eight feet and shut the road beyond the pay gate indefinitely, along with the 260-space lot and three restrooms.

Hard to say how much summer revenue washed away with the sand, or how much it will cost to fix it, and whether it can get done before this winter cuts loose.

The shape of things to come? Malibu officials note that coastline stretches that lost beachfront homes in the January 2025 Palisades Fire no longer have the seawalls those homes provided — leaving the coast more exposed than it's been in decades, right as the surf itself gets more supercharged. City officials are publicly pushing state agencies for urgency shoring up PCH, which runs close enough to the crumbling edge that repair crews say there's no room to work safely between highway and water.

HOW WORRIED SHOULD CALIFORNIANS BE ABOUT THIS FALL AND WINTER?

Pretty worried, and getting more so. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of a "very strong" or "super" El Niño above 90 percent — some outlooks flag a roughly 69 percent chance it becomes the strongest on record, surpassing anything since 1950. Sea surface temps in the equatorial Pacific already run more than 3°C/5.4°F above normal, with bigger anomalies at depth. NOAA's August 20 outlook leans Southern California toward above-normal winter precipitation, with the heaviest rain arriving late — peaking January through March 2027, echoing 1998 and 2024, both of which delivered brutal February storms.

Translation for cliff dwellers and burnout-lot owners: this year's south swells were just the opening act. If the super El Niño materializes, the real stress test for Steamer Lane, Point Dume, and every eroding bluff between the Border Fence and the Golden Gate comes with the winter storm train.

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE, WITH THE THREAT OF MUDSLIDES

Coastal erosion is a worry, but just as big a threat — maybe bigger — is the destruction of the precariously perched precipice palaces parodied for laughs in the 1967 movie "Don't Make Waves": relentless rain turning Malibu's hills to goo and plummeting homes and property values onto PCH.

Duke's Malibu sat right in the fire zone during the Palisades Fire but came through unscathed, since a couple dozen engines used the parking lot as a staging area. But on February 13, 2025, the National Weather Service reported ¾" to 1.2" of rain an hour fell on fire-stripped hillsides, triggering a mudslide down Las Flores Canyon that turned the creek into a river, jumped the road, and flooded straight into Duke's — wrecking the kitchen, electrical, and plumbing. A firefighter was swept off Big Rock Road in his car during the same storm system (he survived with minor injuries). Duke's stayed closed until March 13, 2026 — fourteen months of no Gidget or Taco Tuesday. Harsh.

Rain knocks down fire danger, but it's a double-edged sword — a pharmakon, if you want to get all Greek about it. Malibu has a long history of dangerous, damaging mudslides going back much farther than the fiction of "Don't Make Waves." The Storm of 1938 — a five-day deluge dumping roughly 11 inches on Southern California, killing dozens citywide — is the earliest mass-casualty benchmark, still spoken of in capital letters; it washed houses and stretches of coast road into the sea, triggering the Army Corps project that entombed the LA River in concrete, still regarded as one of the region's biggest ecological disasters.

The wet winter of 1969 brought another dozen deaths and $15 million in regional damage ($137,000,000 in 2026 dollars) after a massive slide shut down PCH at the Palisades–Santa Monica line. In spring 1979, a slow-moving slide above the bluffs between Malibu and Santa Monica shut PCH entirely for about a month while crews installed an unprecedented four-way warning system and a rockfall catchment area, requiring removal of more than a million cubic yards of material and reinforcement of the slope with rock dowels — one of the most expensive landslide remediation projects in Caltrans history. While the highway sat closed, Malibu ran a temporary 41-person ferry to shuttle people around the blocked road, charging a princely $2 a ride — an idea that's resurfaced nearly half a century later as The Blue Highway. If PCH goes down again, the ferry could turn out to be essential — though that might depend on the Malibu Pier being reinforced and reopened.

Big Rock Mesa — where the restaurant known as Moonshadows (RIP 1966 to 2025), formerly the Big Rock Cafe (RIP 1949 to 1966), once stood — has crept for decades, no single storm to blame. Deformation was first documented in late 1971 or early 1972, the aftereffect of exceptionally heavy rain in the winter of 1968 into spring 1969. The mesa took another hit in the winter of 1977-78, when roughly 34 inches of rain fell in just four months. By spring 1980, geologists had identified four separate areas of distress, and by September 1983 movement of the main landslide mass was "widely recognized" — driven largely by artificially elevated groundwater, as septic systems and irrigation from homes on the mesa above pumped water straight into an already unstable slope. Survey monuments tracked the ground moving 1.6 to 4.3 feet a year between September 1983 and July 1984. Dozens of homes were damaged or destroyed, triggering years of litigation and eventually a special assessment district — still active — just to manage drainage and monitor the slope in perpetuity.

The 1997-98 El Niño — one of the two "gold standard" events meteorologists still measure against — shut Malibu Canyon Road for weeks under repeated mudslides, forced evacuation of roughly a dozen homes in Las Flores Canyon, and partially collapsed a 140-foot, 20-year-old retaining wall on Rambla Orienta, damaging two homes above the slide. Mudslides on PCH forced the closure of the local courthouse.

The November 2018 Woolsey Fire set the modern template: burn first, flood second. The fire burned nearly 100,000 acres across Malibu and the surrounding mountains, killing three people directly and destroying over 1,600 structures. Rains hit those denuded hillsides almost immediately — by December, mudslides were closing PCH at Leo Carrillo State Beach in both directions, and residents stacked as many as 18,000 sandbags, only to watch mud, rocks and water blow through the barriers anyway.

The most recent chapter is still unfolding. The January 2025 Palisades Fire tore through the hills above Malibu, killing 12 people (half of them Malibu residents), destroying roughly 700 structures (530 homes), and burning away the vegetation holding those slopes together. The first serious rain hit weeks later: on February 7, 2025, mud and debris shut down PCH between Malibu and Santa Monica overnight.

LA CONCHITA 2005 AND MONTECITO

People with long memories go back to January 10, 2005, when a landslide struck La Conchita, California after a 15-day stretch of rain (not an El Niño winter) that dropped 14.9 inches on nearby Ventura — nearly a full year's worth — killing 10 people and destroying or badly damaging up to 36 homes. Want to be alarmed? Google "La Conchita landslide."

A couple years ago, I went with Steve Woods to a Coastal Commission meeting in Port Hueneme about removing sediment trapped behind Rindge Dam. Homeowners in Serra Retreat and Malibu Colony worried about the downstream effect. Right after that meeting, we saw the flood damage in Montecito after the Thomas Fire — as hard to fathom as the Palisades Fire aftermath: girders wrapped around palm trees, luxury cars smashed flat, houses split in half with books still on the shelves. Those flows roared down four creeks a month after the fire stripped the hillsides bare, mobilizing an estimated 680,000 cubic meters of mud, boulders and water at speeds near nine mph, overwhelming debris basins built for exactly that purpose.

The January 9, 2018 Montecito debris flow killed 23 people and caused total economic losses exceeding $1 billion once debris removal, infrastructure repair, and the two-week closure of Highway 101 are factored in. Montecito itself only recorded about 2.1 inches of rain over nine hours — unremarkable — but the damage came from brutal intensity bursts packed into minutes, including one five-minute stretch that dropped over half an inch, a 200-year event.

Same lesson as Duke's and Las Flores Canyon: on burn-scarred ground, it's not the storm total that kills you, it's how hard the rain falls in the worst few minutes. Hard to believe creeks about the size of Malibu Creek could do that much damage — but the Nepal disaster helps one understand just how powerful constricted water can be when cut loose by nature.

THE GEOLOGY: WHY MALIBU SLIDES

I've always said this, but it's incorrect: "The hills of Malibu are pretty much impacted beach, and we all know what happens to that when it rains too much — it all turns to slush."

Claude corrected me: "The Santa Monica Mountains aren't old, hard bedrock — they're young, weakly cemented marine sedimentary rock, mostly sandstone and shale from the Modelo and Topanga formations, laid down when this stretch of coast was still underwater millions of years ago. That rock is riddled with joints and bedding planes that tilt toward the ocean in places, and it's cut through by the active Malibu Coast Fault. Add steep slopes — some of the bluffs above Pacific Coast Highway rise at grades that would be unbuildable anywhere sane — and you have a landscape structurally primed to fail.

"Saturate that soft rock with water, and it loses cohesion fast; a slope that holds its shape bone-dry can liquefy and move within hours once rain gets into it. Layer wildfire on top — burning off the root systems and chaparral that hold the topsoil in place — and the hills become, quite literally, a slurry waiting for a trigger. Add human development — roads cut into the base of slopes, septic systems and irrigation pumping extra groundwater into hillsides never meant to hold it — and you've built a machine for disaster. Geologists put it bluntly: you don't build in the Santa Monica Mountains so much as borrow space from a landscape that's still actively falling into the sea."

Clever Claude, but a caveat to one and all.

THE MANSION PEOPLE THINK IS THE GETTY VILLA

The mansion everyone thinks is the Getty Villa is actually Villa de Leon, a 35-room, 10,000-square-foot Italianate mansion built in 1927 by wool magnate Leon Kauffman (wool? What was he selling, the Golden Fleece?), sitting directly above the Getty Villa's own entrance road off PCH. Both buildings share the terra-cotta-and-white-stucco Mediterranean look, and Villa de Leon sits closer to the highway and more visibly, which is exactly why so many drivers — including plenty of longtime locals — assume they're looking at the museum. They're not even accessible from the same road; the actual Getty Villa isn't visible from PCH at all.

And fittingly for this stretch of coastline, Villa de Leon sits on its own documented old landslide — the hillside beneath it reportedly gave way once before, in the early 1980s during a heavy El Niño winter, sliding onto PCH, injuring people on the highway, and setting off lawsuits against the homeowners, the city, and the state. That Italianate mansion is sitting on a big, bulging wad of dirt that always looked like it was about to bust open like one of Dolly Parton's dresses.

The Palisades Fire also quietly compromised the highway's own bracing nearby — the 710-foot "Getty Villa wall" and the 460-foot Big Rock catchment wall both had wood-lagged supports that burned or scorched, weakening the containment behind them. When those supports burned away, and with the rain that followed, it's a blessing and a miracle the hillside didn't cut loose across PCH. If it had, that would've put the highway in deep kimchi and closed it for who knows how long.

DOLLY'S DECOLLETAGE

How much dirt is actually contained in what we're right here and now officially renaming Dolly's Decolletage, in honor of a lovely woman who spent some time around Malibu? No official figure exists — and that's not a gap in the reporting, it's the honest state of the record. A catchment wall is preventative; nobody measures precisely what it's holding back, because the point is to keep it from ever coming down and being counted.

For comparison, the 2017 Big Sur landslide buried Highway 1 under roughly five million cubic yards of rock and sediment — roughly 7.5 to 10 million tons, or about 20-27 Golden Gate Bridges' worth of material — making it six to eight times larger than the 2018 Montecito debris flow. Nothing close to that kind of figure exists for Big Rock or Getty Villa Drive, because so far, it hasn't had to.

What is documented: Caltrans repaired the Getty Villa wall and fully rebuilt the Big Rock catchment wall — steel beams, concrete lagging, drainage, a protective barrier, rockfall mesh, a security fence — for roughly $17 million, completed mid-July 2026, with fire-recovery work along the rest of PCH continuing through year's end. Erosion here has compounded further because many of the seawalls that used to buffer the coast belonged to homes that burned down. This is the backdrop against which the record-strength El Niño is now developing: exposed and vulnerable, high and low.

BRACE YOURSELVES FOR AN ATMOSPHERIC DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

Asked if this El Niño will affect California, Mark Sponsler made the noise Lurch makes when troubled: "Yes, all of California is expected to be impacted, specifically San Francisco down to San Diego, starting north in December and working south into January and February. Multiple strong Atmospheric River events should be expected."

When I argue with wild-eyed chemtrailistas online, I point out that California's weather is driven by the jet stream, a river of air miles high in the atmosphere — trying to affect it with a chemical would be like farting in a tornado. But can El Niño itself affect the jet stream? Sponsler: "The exact outcome is unknown and won't be estimable until 1-2 weeks before it starts. But based on past events, once the pattern starts, it will probably dig in and persist for weeks if not months."

DON'T MAKE LIGHT OF MUDSLIDES

House-wrecking mudslides played for comedy in "Don't Make Waves" are anything but funny to homeowners on fire-burned land. Sponsler agrees: "The big concern in my mind is mudslides. Steady Atmospheric River events saturate the ground fast, and dumping more rain on saturated, steeply sloping, burn-scarred ground — well, you know what happens. My estimation is the stronger the El Niño, the further south the focus will be, so Southern California, like Malibu, would be a prime target. Right now water temps in the El Niño monitoring region are only +1.8 degrees above normal. That puts us in a Strong El Niño category. All data suggests this event will develop as forecast — the proverbial train has left the station."

WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS

So without putting too fine a point on it: something wicked this way comes. February, or maybe sooner. If you know any rain-dance appeasements, bust those moves now. Mark Sponsler's message:

"1) A strong, if not 'Super,' El Niño is coming.

"2) Start preparations now — high winds, long durations of rain, flooding, mudslides, large surf, coastal erosion, damage to beachfront property, power outages, higher than normal tides.

"3) Stay tuned to official NOAA/NWS forecasts and heed local authorities when these conditions develop."