By Alysse Dodge / Fox5 – Yahoo News / October 22, 2026
El Niño’s impacts are already being felt across the nation, including elevated sea levels and coastal flooding.
For example, Tropical Storm Rachel caused surf to overtop and breach the bulkhead protecting the Long Beach Peninsula on the weekend of October 11-12, collapsing part of one of the state’s oldest boardwalks and leaving eight buildings red-tagged as unsafe. The same storm severely flooded 15-20 blocks of Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula, prompting a local emergency declaration.
The East Coast is also being affected by the 2026-2027 El Niño, which the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration says has an 83% chance of being the strongest ever on record. New Jersey and New England coastal communities were flooded by a powerful nor’easter at the end of September.
After storms like these, the response is typically the same — rocks, sandbags and concrete are put on the beach under emergency permits. However, in most states, nothing ensures they ever come off.
The Surfrider Foundation released its annual State of the Beach report on Monday, which focuses on the negative impacts of emergency shoreline armoring.
Once a hard structure is in place, the beach is pinned in place, upland sand replenishment is cut off and erosion accelerates on neighboring properties, which creates a need for more armoring. In some states, temporary structures become permanent without any new permit.
“As these ’emergencies’ become more common along our shores, the state policy frameworks developed to allow emergency armoring to protect life and property in coastal areas, many decades old, are unintentionally contributing to the permanent loss of our beaches,” the report says. “This temporary-to-permanent pipeline is making our beaches more vulnerable to irreversible losses in the future.”
Click here to read Surfrider’s 2026 State of the Beach Report.
Although many states are investing in long-term sea level rise and adaptation planning, emergency rules can quickly undermine those plans.
Twenty-seven of the 30 coastal and Great Lakes states evaluated earned a C or lower for their policies to prevent unnecessary permanent armoring during or after an emergency, and no state earned an A.
“An emergency permit should buy time for meaningful adaptation — not become a poor substitute for it,” said Emma Haydocy, Surfrider’s Coasts & Climate Initiative Senior Manager.
Moving forward, Surfrider recommends that every coastal state does the following:
- Redefine emergencies to exclude forecasted hazards such as predicted storms, king tides, and sea level rise.
- Require written authorization in advance, ideally issued on-site after an agency inspection.
- Prioritize removal and restoration, limiting emergency structures to a maximum of two years.
- Trigger a long-term erosion response, so an emergency permit leads to nature-based solutions such as dune restoration, living shorelines, and planned relocation.
Surfrider’s national network of volunteer-led chapters and student clubs are bringing the recommended list above to city council’s, county commission and state agencies across the country. The foundation is a nonprofit dedication to the protection and enjoyment of the world’s ocean, waves and beaches.
