Newsom Declares State Of Emergency As Monster El Niño Menaces CA

SACRAMENTO, CA — Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for California on Monday in anticipation of the "historic" El Niño season expected to trigger flooding, landslides, power outages and the destruction of vulnerable homes and businesses.

Newsom issued a proclamation that would speed up the governments' ability to prepare for the winter storms, including the purchase of flood equipment such as water pumps and sandbags as well as "other critical equipment," officials said. His order would also prepare the National Guard to be ready to help with disaster relief, search-and-rescue missions, and more. It also allows state agencies to fast-track permitting for work such replenishing beaches and revamping sea walls to help reduce flooding and land slide risks.

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"We are preparing for this El Niño early because every Californian deserves to be safe in their home, connected to their community, and protected when severe weather comes," Newsom said in a written statement.

The governor's office said Caltrans will also stage traffic-control, road closures, and prepare snow-removal equipment along highways that are most at risk.

"We are not waiting for this season's storms to be on our doorstep," Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director of the state Office of Emergency Services said in a statement on Monday. "By planning early and coordinating resources ahead of El Niño, we are working to ensure communities and first responders have the personnel, equipment, and support they need to prepare for severe weather, respond quickly when conditions change, and protect lives and property across California."

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Additionally, the proclamation directs the Governor's Office of Emergency Services to expand multilingual communications for severe weather, flooding, emergency alerts, evacuation readiness, and power outages.

This year's El Niño-fueld fall and winter storms are expected to be dangerous, and "Californians should take it seriously."

Already there are signs of danger ahead.

A coastally trapped Kelvin wave currently moving north along Mexico could reach the Los Angeles area in early October and raise coastal sea levels by roughly 6 to 12 inches, Dillon Amaya, Ph.D. and assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, told Patch.

And after Hurricane Marie stripped away sand and damaged homes across parts of Southern California earlier this month, Amaya said the erosion could leave some areas more exposed to whatever comes next.

Amaya said the recent erosion could leave places such as Long Beach more vulnerable to the effects of rising sea levels and pounding surf. Particularly hard hit were Long Beach, Laguna Beach, Dana Point and Malibu, where several beaches were denuded and homes were red-tagged.

“The beach is often acting as a ... buffer towards wave energy crashing along the coastline,” Amay added.

With steeper, shallower beaches, Amaya said, wave energy can interact with the coastline with greater force and more water can reach buildings, roads and other infrastructure that the beach would otherwise help protect.

"Certainly more beach erosion is on the table," he said.

State officials said national meteorologists have warned El Niño is growing in strength, and has a chance of more than 90% of becoming "a very strong event" this year, and a 75% chance of reaching "historic strength."

The governor's office said the Pacific Ocean has become "unusually warm," which can trigger a change in the how the storm tracks.

RELATED: Rare Sea Snakes, Tropical Fish Could Turn Up Along LA County Coast During El Niño

Recent research indicates El Niños conditions are more than 36% stronger than they were before the industrial age began in the mid 1800s, with a 16% jump in just the last 40 years, showing that the increase is accelerating, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science. The findings come as a strong El Niño that formed a couple months ago is forecast to be the biggest on record in coming months. El Niño, which is a temporary warming of parts of the equatorial Pacific, impact weather worldwide and increase extreme events, including heat waves, floods in some places and droughts in others. They can cost trillions in damage.

“That’s important because strong El Niños have much stronger impacts on climate hazards and extremes worldwide. When we set out to answer the question of why this might be happening, we set our data up against a record of global temperature, and we found that the increase in El Niño’s strength closely parallels the rise in global temperature that is due to human causes such as the burning of fossil fuels,” said study lead author Julia Cole, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Michigan.

Her study looks back at El Niño patterns going back 900 years or so.

An El Niño’s strength is determined by measuring water temperature in a region of the central Pacific around the equator and comparing a three-month average to normal. If it’s 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal, it’s becomes an El Nino. The top of the scale is 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and is called “very strong.” The most recent weekly El Niño figure is at 2.7 degrees (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) and is expected to keep growing for another two to four months, according to Columbia University’s El Niño tracker.

Scientists have long theorized that as the world warms, El Niños would get stronger because they are based on ocean temperature differences compared to average. But observational records only goes back about 75 years, so scientists have previously said the data is too spotty for a trend. So scientists have looked for clues that indicate an El Niño without measuring water temperatures directly. Scientists, for example, have looked back at historical records of changes in weather around the world and figured out past El Niños — such as the super-sized one in 1877 — due to the changes they cause across the globe.

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Patch Local Editor Scott Snowden and the Associated Press contributed to this report.