LONG BEACH, Calif.— It was 3:30 a.m.
on Oct.9 and the unthinkable was happening all around Shawn Curtis: The boardwalk in front of his two-story beachfront apartment building was gone.
The 25-foot-wide sand beach was gone.Salt water poured in from all sides.
And now the building was slanting down into the ocean.Curtis couldn’t make sense of what he saw.“The doorframe was crooked.
The window was crooked, and then I saw a big wave crash,” he told NBC News on Thursday.The surf crashed all the way up to the second floor.Neighbors across the street said they could see water cascading down onto the roof of Curtis’ home of nine years.
Booming waves were loud enough to wake him and shake his apartment as though an earthquake rippled through, he said.Shawn Curtis and his dog Lux escaped through Curtis' bedroom window when waves overtook his apartment.Adam Amengual for NBC News“We rushed for our lives, but it was clear the house was toast,” Curtis said, referring to his roommate.“It was a foregone conclusion.
It was gone.”The worst of El Niño is still months away, but Southern California’s fragile coastline is already being transformed by record-setting king tides and storm surges.An unusually active hurricane season triggered a trio of storms that pummeled Hawaii and Mexico earlier this year.The historic weather pattern claimed more than a dozen homes along the shore in Long Beach, swallowing up boardwalks and portions of the Pacific Coast Highway farther south.“This is just a little bit of a taste of what we will see in the future,” warned Timu Gallien with the Coastal Flood Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.Long Beach officials have said old infrastructure wasn't built for today's rapidly changing climate patterns.Adam Amengual for NBC NewsLast weekend, destructive surf thrashed coastal communities from Malibu to San Diego, flooding neighborhoods in Newport Beach and forcing people to evacuate homes in Long Beach that were onc...