Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [118]
Leo and Roxanne Mulhouse had a front seat on all this, of course, because of their house’s location on the cliff edge in Leucadia. Leo had spent many an hour since being let go sitting before their west window, or even standing out on the porch in the elements, watching the storms come onshore. It was an astonishing thing to see that much weather crashing into a coastline. The clouds and sky appeared to pour up over the southwest horizon together. They flew overhead and yet the cliffs and the houses held, making the wind howl at the impediment, compressed and intensified in this first assault on the land.
This particular morning was the worst yet. Tree branches tossed violently; three eucalyptus trees had been knocked over on Neptune Avenue alone. And Leo had never seen the sea look like this before. All the way out to where rapidly approaching black squalls blocked the view of the horizon, the ocean was a giant sheet of raging surf. Millions of whitecaps rolled toward the land under flying spume and spray, the waves toppling again and again over infinitely wind-rippled gray water. The squalls flew by rapidly, or came straight on in black bursts of rain against the house’s west side. Brief patches and shards of sunlight lanced between these squalls, but failed to light the sea surface in their usual way; the water was too shredded. The gray shafts of light appeared to be eaten by spray.
Up and down Neptune Avenue, their cliff was wearing away. It happened irregularly, in sudden slumps of various sizes, some at the cliff top, some at the base, some in the middle.
The erosion was not a new thing. The cliffs of San Diego had been breaking off throughout the period of modern settlement, and presumably for all the centuries before that. But along this level stretch of seaside cliff north and south of Moonlight Beach, the houses had been built close to the edge. Surveyors studying photos had seen little movement in the cliff’s edge between 1928 and 1965, when the construction began. They had not known about the storm of October 12, 1889, when 7.58 inches of rain had fallen on Encinitas in eight hours, triggering a flood and bluff collapse so severe that A, B, and C Streets of the new town had disappeared into the sea. They also did not understand that grading the bluffs and adding drainage pipes that led out the cliff face destroyed natural drainage patterns that led inland. So the homes and apartment blocks had been built with their fine views, and then years of efforts had been made to stabilize the cliffs.
Now, among other problems, the cliffs were often unnaturally vertical as a result of all the shoring up they had been given. Concrete and steel barriers, iceplant berms, wooden walls and log beams, plastic sheets and molding, crib walls, boulder walls, concrete abutments—all these efforts had been made in the same period when the beaches were no longer being replenished by sand washing out of the lagoons to the north, because all these had had their watersheds developed and their rivers made much less prone to flooding sand out to sea. So over time the beaches had disappeared, and these days waves stuck directly at the bases of ever-steepening cliffs. The angle of repose was very far exceeded.
Now the ferocity of the Hyperniño was calling all that to account, overwhelming a century’s work all at once. The day before, just south of the Mulhouses’ property, a section of the cliff a hundred feet long and fifteen feet deep went, burying a concrete berm lying at the bottom of the cliff. Two hours later a hemispheric arc forty feet deep had fallen into the surf just