Newport Beach resident Chad Huntley, who lives not far from the Balboa Fun Zone on the city’s peninsula, has spent several evenings meeting with elderly neighbors to warn them of the possibility of flooding this week.
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But as someone with a software engineering background, doing computer simulations for NASCAR’s Toyota racing division, he said he started gathering government data like sea wall heights to create an online resource for the city and the community.
The simulator, at nbflood.com, is meant to show what happens at sea levels higher than the expected tides and likely areas flooded when tide levels reach upward of 8 feet.
“Putting all that stuff together helped me visualize the weak spots and how water was going to flow, based on elevations,” he said, also going around the peninsula and Balboa Island with a measuring tool to compare data. “And sure enough, a couple days ago, it happened as predicted. It seems like there is some sort of way to predict it.”
He’s hoping the simulator will help his neighbors not just this week, but throughout the El Niño season — especially as tides are expected to be even higher.
Huntley dug up city surveys of all the sea wall heights throughout the region and looked for areas that would be lower than an 8.4-foot tide.
“I put together a simulator to show, when walls breach, how water would flow into the neighborhoods and streets,” he said. “I originally put it together because we were curious about our own house, how much time we had at certain tide levels.”
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Huntley then expanded it to the entire Peninsula “to hopefully help everyone else.”
On Tuesday, Huntley checked on how much water was coming through the defenses the city and Newport Harbor Yacht Club tried to put up after flooding a day earlier.
He stood at 9th Street and West Bay Avenue, where one of the lower walls around the harbor, at about 7.6 feet, was predicted to overflow. Nearby neighborhoods have walls that sit at about 8 feet 10 inches.
“So this is a significant dip,” he said of the wall that was being overtopped by water, despite a row of sandbags on top. “They put up sandbags and they held for a little bit. But you can tell, it just wasn’t enough.”
If the water height stays an estimated 2 feet above the predicted tides, it could spell even more flooding when the seasonal king tides are expected to surpass 7 feet during Thanksgiving and Christmas times – meaning they could push to 9 feet, sending water over seawalls and flooding the streets and homes.
“That’s what we’re trying to do, assume and prepare for the worst but really hope for the best,” he said. “We’re trying to get people to take it seriously.”
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