Beachgoers seeking relief from the recent heat or simply desiring a walk near the ocean have been met over the past week with advisories to stay away and warnings to be extremely cautious.
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Those alarms won’t be turned off anytime this weekend.
“The waves may ease down a little bit,” National Weather Service meteorologist Anamaria Navarrete said Friday. “But they’re still going to be very high [tides].”
The waves already have proven to be deadly. Two Bay Area college students, both from Fremont, died after being swept out by waves while at Panther Beach in Santa Cruz County on June 10.
On Thursday, safety officials blamed a sneaker wave for sweeping a woman and her preteen child out ot the ocean at Baker Beach in San Francisco. Both were hospitalized with injuries that threatned their lives and were in critical condition, according to the San Francisco Fire Dept.
“The incident is a stark reminder of the dangers of sneaker waves along San Francisco’s coastline,” the department wrote in a statement on social media. “Sneaker waves surge much farther up the beach than expected, without warning.”
The high tides are were responsible for inundating areas that high tides don’t normally reach with ocean water 1¾ feet deep, according to the weather service. A coastal flood advisory for those areas ended Thursday.
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A beach hazards statement issued last week and originally set to expire Thursday remained in effect through 5 a.m. Saturday. Navarrete said it would not surprise her if that statement is extended longer. Temperatures are expected to warm up this weekend and into next week.
“There are some very intense storms in the southern hemisphere,” Navarrete said. “Becasue of those, the waves are coming all the way from that hemisphere. Since they don’t have much of a way to break them or slow them down, as they cross the Pacific Ocean from south to north, they build up energy.”
As a result, the tides that are potentially deadly. The Pacific Ocean off San Francisco has been incurring the southerly swell of waves for more than a week, and it’s added to the power of the sneaker waves and rip tides already here, the weather service said. The greatest threat of those swells are to beaches that face the southwest.
Weather service and public safety officials said the safest thing to do is to stay away from the beaches altogether until the southern swells start subsiding. Barring that, they said that using jet skis, going on piers and climbing on the rocks is an invitation to trouble.
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