Tiburon, Belvedere brace for El Niño, king tides
Tiburon and Belvedere are filling sandbag stations and readying a shared emergency operations center for a winter that forecasters expect to bring a strong to very strong El Niño, and officials say residents need to get ready too.
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center said Oct. 8 there is a “greater than an 83% chance” a strong to very strong El Niño lasts through January-March. It put the same 83% odds on October-December bringing an event stronger than any El Niño since 1950. Its next update is due Nov. 12.
NOAA’s Oct. 15 seasonal outlook gives much of California, and the West Coast as far north as the Oregon coast, elevated odds of above-normal rain from November through January, though with less confidence than for the Southeast.
The season’s highest tides are predicted Nov. 24-26, Dec. 22-25 and Jan. 20-22, topping out at 7.23 feet above the average daily low tide Dec. 24 at NOAA’s San Francisco gauge. Those predictions don’t account for weather, and actual tides have been running 6 inches to 1 foot higher, Steven Torrence, director of the county Office of Emergency Management, told the Belvedere-Tiburon Emergency Preparedness Council Oct. 20.
Marin supervisors proclaimed a countywide local emergency that day, Torrence said, and Tiburon declared its own the next night.
Both towns have warned that they can’t stop every flood, and they are asking residents to sign up for emergency alerts, stock supplies and plan how to get home or shelter in place.
At an Oct. 14 El Niño workshop at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library, Laurie Nilsen, the Tiburon Police Department’s emergency services coordinator for Tiburon and Belvedere, told the more than 30 attendees that the most important thing they could do is become part of the emergency-preparation effort, just as much as the public works, fire and police crews who respond.
“For every one of you that’s prepared and can take care of themselves, that’s one less person, one less household that we have to worry about,” Nilsen said.
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