Earlier this month, the California coast was hit by a Kelvin wave, a deep ocean wave that can raise sea levels, but to most people, it wasn’t immediately visible. Named after Lord Kelvin, the mathematician who discovered them in the late 19th century, these waves don’t roll and crash along the shore like a tsunami or hurricane. They are slow-moving, mostly flat, waves of warm water that can stretch thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean.
“It’s like an enormous bathtub sloshing around,” Mark Cane, professor emeritus of earth and climate sciences at Columbia University, told NPR on Monday. Kelvin waves are totally natural, forming throughout the year from warming ocean water and usually not impacting coastlines by a noticeable amount. But this year’s record-shattering El Niño climate pattern threatens to make Kelvin waves a little more intense throughout the winter, potentially inundating hundreds of thousands of Californians with up to two feet of elevated sea level, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, told USA Today. He called it “pretty significant.”
It’s not just more Kelvin waves headed for California. The state predicts the colder seasons will bring extra powerful storms that risk bringing damage and floods. In September, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a statewide emergency declaration in preparation for the unpredictable conditions.
The Trump administration’s response to this is essentially to say “don’t expect help.” On Tuesday, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Cameron Hamilton told state officials to prepare to pay out of pocket for disasters without federal assistance. “Every state must have the appropriate financial reserves” and other abilities “to ensure that recovery efforts can start immediately and not necessarily be held up simply because of the federal [disaster] declaration process,” Hamilton said, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by Politico. He added that “A future that I hope we would shoot for is one where we wouldn’t require as many disasters because the capability of states is so high and so substantial,” referring to presidential authorizations of disaster aid.
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California officials are taking Hamilton at his word. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported the state is “ramping up resources to help communities across the state prepare for potentially devastating storms and flooding spurred by a record ongoing El Niño.”
“They swore an oath to serve this country and protect the American people. Now they’re abandoning FEMA’s mission and telling Americans in states across the country to fend for themselves,” Newsom said in a press release. “When disaster strikes, Americans help one another regardless of politics.”
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