Among the highest tides of the year are expected along our coast Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning, producing an arresting site that an Orange County environmental group is encouraging you to see for yourself.
But Orange County Coastkeeper is not suggesting the exercise for sightseeing purposes. Rather, they want you to imagine those tides swallowing an operational desalination plant proposed for Huntington Beach.
“If the Poseidon desalination plant is built on the Huntington Beach floodplains, the project will require structural protective barriers such as seawalls, groins, breakwaters and other coastal armoring structures, triggering an additional suite of costs and impacts to our state and coast,” reads a Coastkeeper pitch to the media to film the so-called king tides rolling in.
“Coastkeeper questions why Poseidon wants to place the billion-dollar project where projected sea level rise makes it even more expensive and risky.”
The king tides are to wash in the first day of winter at 6:17 a.m. Tuesday and then return at 7 a.m. Wednesday and 7:41 a.m. Thursday, which is Christmas Eve. King tides are due back Jan. 21-22.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.