Eight Long Beach Structures Red-Tagged After Storm Surf Batters Alamitos Peninsula

By Dana Mercer, Previously

October 12, 2026

The water has receded from the Alamitos Peninsula, but for the households behind the red tags on Seaside Walk, Monday was the start of a longer wait — for inspections, for tides to ease, and for word on when home is home again.

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The cleanup and the wait. That is what Monday looked like on the Alamitos Peninsula, the narrow, beloved strip of Long Beach where the ocean spent the weekend reminding residents how thin the line is between a beachfront address and the Pacific itself. Surf driven by Post-Tropical Cyclone Rachel battered the Peninsula, tore wooden sections out of a boardwalk that has stood for roughly a century, and pushed seawater across streets and into homes. By Monday, city officials had red-tagged eight structures spread across 13 addresses — the formal, unwelcome designation that a building is unsafe to occupy.

One additional structure was yellow-tagged, a lesser but still disruptive classification that allows limited entry, generally so residents can retrieve belongings rather than live in the space. Between the two designations sits the reality for a cluster of households at the start of this week: they can see their homes, in some cases they can step inside briefly, but they cannot stay. More regional coverage is in our news section.

What a Red Tag Actually Means

For readers who have never lived through a building inspection after a disaster, the tag system is simple in concept and heavy in consequence. A red tag means inspectors have determined a structure is unsafe to occupy — the concern can involve foundation damage, structural shifting, compromised walls or floors, or water damage severe enough that living in the building poses a risk. Nobody sleeps there until the problems are addressed and the building is cleared. A yellow tag is the middle ground: the structure is not cleared for normal living, but limited, careful entry is permitted, typically to collect essentials, documents and valuables.

On the Peninsula, the mandatory evacuations were narrowest and firmest where the damage was concentrated. Homes in the 6400 and 6500 blocks of Seaside Walk remained under mandatory evacuation as the week began. Even where the broader emergency had eased, evacuation warnings stayed in place for a defined set of addresses: 64th, 65th and 66th Places south of Ocean Boulevard, and the 6200, 6300, 6600 and 6700 blocks of Seaside Walk. That block-by-block precision reflects how uneven storm damage is on a peninsula — one stretch of seawall or boardwalk fails, the water finds a path, and two streets can have entirely different Mondays.

Among the residents caught in that patchwork is Natalie Cabrera, 59, who rents a bungalow in the affected area and described damage to the foundation and water intrusion in her home. Her situation captures a particular vulnerability in coastal disasters: renters face the same flooded floors and displaced nights as owners, but with fewer levers to pull when repairs, inspections and timelines are decided. What she and her neighbors share, regardless of tenure, is dependence on a process — inspection, repair, re-inspection — that moves at the speed of crews and paperwork, not at the speed of people who want to go home.

The Advisories Lifted — and the Ones That Did Not

There was genuine progress over the weekend, and it is worth separating from what remains unresolved. The city lifted its broader advisories Sunday evening, in an announcement at 6:15 p.m., for Naples Island, Treasure Island and most residents of the Peninsula. For those households, the weekend's emergency posture — the bags packed, the cars moved, the watching of tide charts — could begin to stand down. Mayor Rex Richardson and city officials communicated the changes as the surf began, gradually, to subside.

But the lifting of a broad advisory is not an all-clear, and officials were careful to keep the narrower warnings in force for the blocks closest to the damage. The distinction matters for anyone driving toward the Peninsula to check on a property or help a neighbor: an area can be open in general while specific streets remain under mandatory evacuation or warning. The city also urged residents to stay off the sand berms — the piled-sand barriers that are part of the area's flood defenses and that lose their protective value when people climb and erode them — and to stay away from the Peninsula shoreline between Bay Shore Avenue and 72nd Place, the stretch where the surf did its worst work.

The boardwalk damage has become the weekend's defining image for many locals. The wooden walkway along the Peninsula is more than infrastructure; it is a century-old piece of the neighborhood's daily life, the route of morning walks and evening bicycles. Waves tearing out wooden sections of it signals the force involved more vividly than any tide gauge: this was not nuisance flooding at a curb, but surf with enough energy to dismantle built structures and drive the sea into living rooms.

Two More Mornings of High Tides

The uncomfortable fact governing Monday and Tuesday is that the ocean is not finished. The National Weather Service kept a coastal flood advisory in effect until 2 p.m. Tuesday for Los Angeles County beaches, with morning high tides expected to reach 7 to 7.5 feet on both Monday and Tuesday. The surf itself was forecast to gradually subside — the trend is favorable — but a subsiding surf arriving on top of a 7-foot-plus high tide can still send water into streets and properties that have already been weakened, saturated or opened up by the weekend's damage.

That is why the red tags and evacuation warnings are not simply paperwork trailing behind an event that has ended. Inspectors and city crews are working against a calendar written by the tides: each morning's high water is another test of damaged foundations, undermined walkways and sand defenses, and each one can change the assessment of a building that looked stable at low tide. For residents, the practical consequence is that answers may come in stages — a home that cannot be cleared before Tuesday afternoon's advisory expires may be revisited after the tide cycle eases, while a home with foundation concerns faces a longer engineering conversation regardless of the weather.

For the wider Long Beach coast and Los Angeles County beaches generally, the advisory is a reminder to treat Monday and Tuesday mornings with the same caution as the weekend, even under calmer skies. Coastal flooding does not require dramatic weather overhead; it requires high water meeting a vulnerable shoreline, and the Peninsula has just demonstrated how vulnerable parts of that shoreline are.

What Happens Next on the Peninsula

The sequence from here is unglamorous and essential. Inspections determine which yellow-tagged and evacuated properties can be reoccupied and which red-tagged structures need structural repair before any conversation about moving back. Owners coordinate repairs and any required city sign-offs; renters like Cabrera wait on landlords, inspectors and the same tide-dependent schedule as everyone else. The boardwalk and the berms will need their own assessment and repair, because the Peninsula's defenses against the next storm are only as strong as what this storm left behind.

What officials have not done, as of Monday, is put the recovery on a simple timetable — and given the tides still to come, that restraint is understandable. The honest summary for the Alamitos Peninsula at the start of this week is: the emergency has narrowed, the danger has eased but not ended, and for eight red-tagged structures across 13 addresses, plus their neighbors under warning, normal life resumes address by address, inspection by inspection. The cleanup is underway. The wait, for some, will be longer.

Previously will continue following conditions in Long Beach and across the coast in our news coverage.