Posted on October 19, 2026
By Lois Beckett
San Clemente is one of southern California’s most picture-perfect beach towns – a capital of American surf culture since the 1950s. In two years, 2028 Olympic surfers will compete at Lower Trestles, a world-class surfing beach.
But the town’s longtime cultural and economic driver, its beaches, are now under threat. As pounding waves driven by late-summer storms in the Pacific devour chunks of the California coastline, some of San Clemente’s beaches are growing narrower, the sand increasingly eaten away.
Beach erosion has become a crisis all along the southern California shoreline this year, with towns from Dana Point and Long Beach to Malibu sustaining dramatic damage. But San Clemente is a particular flash point. It’s the place where the major regional train line, which carries $1bn in freight a year and is the nation’s second-busiest passenger line, runs right along the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Severe waves and high tides during big storms at the beginning of September forced the repeated closure of the tracks.
Experts say California’s current season of extreme weather is just getting started. “We’re in for a run of pretty exceptional erosion events if this Super El Niño develops as it’s expected to,” said Sean Vitousek, an oceanographer with the US Geological Survey (USGS).
As the potentially historic El Niño season overlaps with a massive surge of warm water called a Kelvin wave, residents worry it will leave coastal infrastructure in pieces, beachfront properties leveled and more beaches carved away to crumbling slivers of gravel and bare rock.
Donald Trump has continued to deny climate change as a “hoax”, “con job” or scam”. But in southern California, a historically conservative area, the effect of extreme weather events linked to the climate crisis have suddenly become very, very real.
“We’ve been anticipating rising sea levels 50 years from now,” said Hallie Jones, the mayor pro tem of Laguna Beach, California. “This summer proved that sea level rise is already here.”
‘A game of attrition’
On a hot, clear day, Cameron Cosgrove, a San Clemente beach restoration activist, took me to the state beach on the south side of town, where swimmers and sunbathers ambled over the major rail line’s tracks to perch on a very narrow strip of sand that descends steeply into the deep blue water.
“You can see, when it gets steep like this, then you’re just at a game of attrition,” Cosgrove told me. “It’s just a matter of time before the next big wave event will start moving and start taking some of this.”
Big storms at the beginning of September already saw the erosion of some of this coastline creep up to the train tracks. “Severe waves and high tides overtopped the tracks,” according to a spokesperson for the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA). The local commuter rail posted a video of sediment next to the tracks crumbling into the sea as waves slammed the shore.
After nearly a century of reliable service, the coastal rail line has been shut down seven times since 2021 for repairs after landslides and surging tides on stretches of the line in San Clemente and further south down the coast. Over the past five years, the closure times “have totaled more than one year”, an OCTA spokesperson confirmed.
There’s no relief ahead. Once considered a gradual problem, coastal erosion is now being discussed more urgently, as the risk of California’s beaches simply disappearing, said Charles Lester, a former head of the California Coastal Commission who now leads an ocean policy center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. California scientists warned in 2023 that sea level rise sped up by the climate crisis threatens to erase between 25% and 75% of California’s beaches by 2100.
This is posing a massive challenge, particularly for leaders of smaller beachside towns whose appeal is built around their ocean access. Orange county, a collection of suburbs clustered between Los Angeles and San Diego, is famous as the birthplace of the Reagan Revolution. Today, the county is more politically purple than deep Republican red – more voters backed Kamala Harris than Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Some of its most famous beach towns, such as Newport Beach, remain Republican strongholds, favoring conservatism and as little government regulation as possible. But extreme weather and the growing threat to beaches is putting pressure even on Republican political orthodoxies.
Southern California’s wealthy coastal towns are used to breezier weather and lower temperatures than Los Angeles, or the scorching cities of the Inland Empire. But record-breaking heatwaves are changing that.
“It’s October 5 and it’s 90 degrees in Dana Point. Unless there’s Santa Ana [winds], it’s unheard of,” said John Gabbard, Dana Point’s Republican mayor. “The ocean temperature is high. There’s no wind. And that’s not happening just by happenstance. Nobody’s using the words ‘global warming’, but everybody is recognizing that it’s warmer and it continues to be warmer through the past few seasons than it’s ever been in the past.”
In San Clemente, where a majority of residents voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, Cosgrove, a retired IT executive, is advocating a radical move: he authored a ballot measure that will go before voters in November, asking local residents to voluntarily impose a 1% sales tax on themselves to fund beach restoration and wildfire prevention efforts. A large portion of that tax revenue would be dedicated to replacing what he estimates is the city’s deficit of 4m to 6m cubic yards of beach sand.
Nobody likes taxes, Cosgrove said, but voters need to face what he believes is the stark reality all along the California coast: if local residents don’t pay to protect public beaches from vanishing, it’s not clear that anyone else will.
Shifting sands
Southern California’s wide, sandy beaches are not exactly a natural resource. Many of them were created or expanded with sand dredged up by major midcentury construction projects.
San Clemente’s beaches, for example, were fortified with an estimated 2m cubic yards of sand removed during the creation of Dana Point’s harbor in the late 1960s, Cosgrove said. “We’ve been living off that ever since,” he said.
Since those midcentury construction projects, further development and infrastructure, especially dams on California’s rivers, has blocked the flows of sediment that would naturally restock the beaches with sand, while competition for the available supply of dredged-up or trucked-in sand has grown more intense. This has made the erosion of California beach sand an ongoing issue for decades – but it’s a problem that is now escalating rapidly.
Much of California’s coastline development was completed during the state’s population boom from the 1940s to 1970s – years that happened to be an unusually “calm climate period” along the Pacific Ocean – “not many big El Niños, not a lot of storm damage”, Griggs, the coastline expert, said. “People built on the cliffs, they built on the bluffs, they built on the dunes.”
Since then, stronger El Niño seasons have returned – and this year threatens to be the worst on record.
Beach town residents such as Jones, the Laguna Beach mayor pro tem, who has lived there for much of her 48 years, are used to seeing sand migrate throughout the year. Beach sand is not a static amenity, but a complex system that can shift onshore and offshore, north and south. Scientists refer to each sand system as a “littoral cell”.
During winter storms, Jones said, Laguna’s beaches typically lose sand, but later storms tend to bring it back, a kind of natural restoration. What’s happening now, though, is “not business as usual”, Jones said.
Vitousek, the USGS oceanographer, said the intensity of this year’s coming tropical storms may disrupt beaches’ natural cycles: “You can get this thrashing, where the beach gets fully eroded on the south end, and then fully eroded on the north end,” he said. While beaches can sometimes recover “in a lot of cases, the damage is done. You’ve lost a beach. The waves are now breaking right on the infrastructure, causing damage.”
A few miles north of San Clemente, in Dana Point, the same ferocious Labor Day waves that paused train traffic through San Clemente ripped through a row of coastal residences, leaving 10 homes red-tagged as uninhabitable.
“The damage that we have seen this year has been extraordinary,” Gabbard, the mayor, said. He estimated there had been $33m in damage to private property, and another $25m in damage to the public beach.
Up and down the coast, lesser beach damage in early September served as a warning of what might be coming in the next months: a beachside parking lot was seriously damaged by waves in Laguna Beach, big sections of sand vanished around Balboa Pier in Newport Beach, and a sinkhole opened in the driveway of Nicholas Cage’s coastal mansion in Malibu.
In October, abnormally high tides flooded a low-lying neighborhood of Newport Beach, with local news outlets sharing footage of someone paddling on a surfboard through the streets. Huge waves damaged more homes in Long Beach. A dramatic crack in a cliffside bluff near Laguna Beach forced the continuing closure of part of the Pacific Coast Highway.
Though San Clemente’s Lower Trestles was not one of the hardest-hit beaches in early September, local news outlets have already begun speculating over whether future Super El Niño damage could cause problems for the beach as a major Olympic venue.
