Ask most people whether Long Beach gets hurricanes and you will get a confident no. Earthquakes, sure. Fires inland, absolutely. But tropical storms are something that happens to Florida.

That answer is wrong, and the proof is a four block stretch of the Peninsula that keeps paying for it.

September 25, 1939

A tropical storm came ashore near San Pedro and Long Beach. Locals called it El Cordonazo, or The Lash of St. Francis, the old name for the late season cyclones that batter the west coast of Mexico around the feast day of St. Francis.

It arrived at the end of a brutal heat wave, with no real warning. Gusts hit 65 miles per hour. Five inches of rain fell in 24 hours. Along Belmont Shore and the Peninsula, the surf pulled ten homes clean off their foundations and carried them out to sea. Scores of others came apart into driftwood. Property losses ran about $2 million at the time, closer to $43 million in today’s money.

It is still the last tropical storm to make landfall in Southern California. The region was so unprepared that the weather bureau opened a Southern California forecast office afterward, and that office is still running today.

Why It Is Always That Block

This is the part that almost nobody explains, and it matters more than any storm story.

The federal breakwater is the reason Long Beach has flat, calm water along most of its shoreline. It shields the city. But the Peninsula sits past the end of that protection, in the gap between the breakwater and the Alamitos Bay jetty. When a swell arrives at the right angle, it threads straight through that opening and lands on one narrow strip of homes with nothing in front of it but sand.

That is why the damage reports from 1939 and the damage reports from this September name the same neighborhood. It is not bad luck and it is not a fluke. It is the shape of the harbor.

What Happened This September

Hurricane Marie never came ashore. It stayed hundreds of miles out in the Pacific and sent its swell in anyway.

Over the weekend of September 6, waves tore through the sand berms, breached the seawall and punched holes in the boardwalk along Seaside Walk. So much sand was dragged back into the ocean that at low tide there was a fifteen foot drop from the boardwalk to the rocks below. On Monday evening the city evacuated roughly twenty homes between 63rd and 67th Place after crews found concrete slabs cracking and buckling between the houses, with some fissures running up under the walls.

The good news is how it ended. Building inspectors cleared 18 of the 19 evacuated properties by Wednesday morning and residents went home. One house was yellow tagged. Nothing was lost to the sea.

If You Are Buying Near the Water

I am not going to tell you to avoid the coast. People have wanted to live on that sand for a hundred years and they still will after this winter. The Peninsula is one of the best places in Southern California to wake up in the morning.

What I will say is that the question is never whether Long Beach floods. It is which block, and how that specific property is built. Two homes a few doors apart can sit on completely different foundations, with different seawall conditions behind them and different flood zone designations. That is a property level answer, not a neighborhood level one, and it is worth getting before you write an offer rather than after.

With a strong El Niño season ahead, this is probably not the last time we talk about it.

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