MENDOCINO CO., 10/29/26 — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday ordered state agencies to find the stretches of Highway 1 most at risk from El Niño storms this winter. The order puts preventive work ahead of the storms.
On the Mendocino coast, Caltrans closed Highway 1 twice last winter for flooding near the Garcia River, north of Point Arena. The road closed Dec. 21, 2025, and again Feb. 24, 2026, Caltrans spokesperson Manny Machado said in an email Oct. 21.
Newsom signed the order at Crystal Cove State Park in Newport Beach. It creates a Highway 1 Task Force led by the California State Transportation Agency and the California Natural Resources Agency.
By Dec. 15, the task force must tell the governor’s office which parts of the highway are “under immediate threat of failure or damage” from El Niño. The report may include a prioritized list of actions, and a second list of the money and maintenance they would need.
The order covers all 656 miles of Highway 1 and names Big Sur, where emergency projects cost about $312 million from 2020 through 2026. It tells Caltrans to watch for landslides where the highway has slid before or has recent burn scars, and to put prevention work there first “to the extent practicable.”
“We know what repeated closures cost these communities, and we’re putting state agencies to work now to reduce the danger before storms hit,” Newsom said in a news release.
Garcia River and Route 128
In a phone interview Oct. 21, Ryan Aylward, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Eureka, said the spot north of Point Arena floods from the river. “When the river is really high and the tides are high, what we’ve found is the water backs up towards the highway,” he said. Tides “may have an impact on it, but it isn’t specifically tides and surf,” he said.
Residents cited the same stretch, near Manchester, the Garcia River and Stornetta Flats, during a Mendocino Council of Governments study of coastal roads and sea level rise, according to Laura Elisa Garza Díaz, a water resources management adviser with UC Cooperative Extension in Ukiah.
“Highway 1 in that location floods almost every year and sometimes multiple times in a year,” she wrote in an email in September. Losing access to a road like that “can have much bigger consequences when there are limited alternative routes,” she wrote.
Caltrans also closed Route 128 for flooding on Nov. 22 and Dec. 25, 2025, from the Highway 1 junction to west of Flynn Creek Road near Navarro, Machado wrote. Neither of the two orders Newsom signed Tuesday mentions Route 128.
“Often before storms, Caltrans will ramp up work and stage equipment in areas that will require a quick response,” Machado wrote.
Rising seas from several sources
A marine heat wave off the coast “has already raised sea levels by a full foot,” California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said in the release. At Arena Cove, the ocean ran about a foot above the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s predicted tides Oct. 9 to 11, according to NOAA’s preliminary gauge data and the Coastal Commission.
Fraser Shilling, director of the UC Davis Road Ecology Center, wrote an Oct. 20 report mapping where El Niño flooding could cut California’s coastal roads this winter. None of its examples is on the Mendocino coast.
This winter’s high water comes from several things adding up, Shilling said in a phone interview Oct. 23. Sea level “has gone up a foot on the coast of California in recorded history,” he said. While it lasts, a Kelvin wave, a long wave from the equator that comes with El Niño, adds about another foot. Warm water expands, and repeated storms push water against the coast “in a way where it doesn’t retreat between the storms.” Factor in runoff, waves and high tides.
“It’s not just one foot of sea level rise, it’s three feet of all of the above,” he said.
Eroding coastal cliffs
Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego compared airborne lidar surveys of the California coast from 2016 and 2023. Lidar uses a laser scanner to build precise, three-dimensional models of the ground.
Most of the fastest cliff retreat, the erosion that pushes a cliff’s edge inland, was in Central and Northern California, the institution said in a release Oct. 23. At the Lost Coast Headlands in Humboldt County, the cliff top lost more than 70 feet a year.
The release lists eight other places where cliff tops lost more than 10 feet a year, including Big Sur.
The study’s own table of high-retreat spots includes two in Mendocino County. About 5 miles north of Rockport, the cliff top lost about 25 feet a year. About 4 miles south of Elk, it lost about 17 feet a year.
Statewide, about 96% of cliffs showed no retreat at the top from 2016 to 2023, and the average was about 1.6 inches a year. The hotspots are exceptions. Mendocino County’s average across all its cliffs, hotspots included, was below the statewide average.
Scripps plans to track changes from El Niño this winter. Funding for the project ends in 2027, according to the release.
Cliff retreat is also impacted by infrastructure. Roads and houses on a bluff change how water moves through it, Shilling said. Runoff from pavement that pours over the edge “starts to erode the edge back,” he said, and unlike the gradual loss of a beach, a bluff collapse “can happen suddenly.”
Mendocino County is adding sea level rise policies to the hazards chapter of its Local Coastal Program, the land use plan and zoning code for the county’s coastal zone. The county already uses how fast a bluff is retreating to set how far new buildings must sit back from its edge.
“All the recent studies have resolved is that the County doesn’t know enough to make really smart planning and permitting decisions in a comprehensive fashion about its 130 miles of coastal zone,” Peter McNamee of the Grassroots Institute wrote in an email Oct. 28. The new policies “really don’t go far enough,” he wrote.
Creeks and sandbags
Newsom signed a second order the same day. It lets the state natural resources secretary waive the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, parts of the Fish and Game Code and other state rules for public agency work to head off El Niño flooding, landslides and erosion. That includes repairing levees and dams, clearing sediment, vegetation or debris from stream channels, and protecting bridges and sea walls.
Removing sediment or vegetation has to stay in dry parts of the channel, and the work can’t remove more than 30% of the native vegetation per mile. Those waivers end Jan. 31, 2027, unless a later order extends them.
The second order also lifts the California Coastal Act permit requirement for sand berms and sandbags placed to hold back flooding or erosion in the coastal zone.
On Oct. 6, county staff told Mendocino County supervisors that clearing one flood-prone creek in Hopland could take nine to 18 months, with about $1 million in studies and permits before a contractor is hired.
“The storm doesn’t respect CEQA,” Supervisor Ted Williams said then. He asked staff to press the governor’s office and the state Office of Emergency Services to waive the process.
The second order lets the state waive the CEQA review Williams complained about, though not federal permits.