Communities along Pacific Northwest shorelines could face severe coastal flooding in November, December and January as potentially record-breaking El Niño conditions arrive on top of the year’s highest tides, known as king tides.

Some Washington cities are stepping up their efforts to prepare for higher seas in advance of king-tide season.

The city of Stanwood is finishing emergency repairs to a crumbling dike that protects much of the city from high tides on Puget Sound.

In the oceanfront village of Taholah on the Olympic Peninsula, Quinault Indian Nation officials were set to break ground on a new “Northeast Neighborhood” on Thursday. They expect to let residents of four of the village’s lowest-lying homes move into modular homes on higher ground this autumn, a major milestone in the tribe’s decade-long effort to relocate its main village away from rising seas and tsunamis.

“Really, I’m haunted every king tide season. I just don’t want them to be there any longer,” Quinault official Alyssa Johnston said of the most vulnerable homes. Johnston, who heads the village relocation project, said the tribe plans to build another 18 upland homes in 2027.

“Basically, those of us on First Street should be moved this fall,” Taholah resident Lia Frenchman said by email. Her modular home sits on cement blocks next to a seawall that is occasionally overtopped by waves.

“I had been talking with the team, too, regarding the weather this fall,” she added. ”I was getting nervous!”

Record-breaking El Niño

The weather phenomenon known as El Niño has been heating a large swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean, with the sea surface off South America getting warmer than researchers have seen in 150 years of record-keeping.

“It’s been so strong so early in the season,” Washington deputy state climatologist Karin Bumbaco said.

The record-breaking El Niño has not affected the Pacific Northwest much yet, but scientists say it’s about to.

Centuries ago, Peruvian mariners noticed a warm current, associated with poor fish catches, that typically peaked in December and named it El Niño (“the Christ Child”). The natural phenomenon weakens trade winds, reduces upwelling of cold, deep seawater and raises water temperatures.

But what happens off Peru doesn’t stay off Peru: El Niño belches ocean heat into the atmosphere and alters weather all around the world.

“That extra heat contributes to many of the climate and weather extremes around the world that we can expect,” University of Washington oceanographer Mike McPhaden said. “Extreme flooding, extreme droughts, extremes in storminess.”

The Pacific Northwest can expect the coming winter to worsen its multiyear drought. For years, low snowpack has been hurting hydropower production, farming and salmon streams, each of which rely on melting mountain snow for water through the Northwest’s dry summer months.

“ We should expect that our winter, broadly speaking, will be warmer than usual by just a few degrees, but that makes a big difference,” McPhaden said. “In our neck of the woods, precipitation will more likely fall as rain, particularly in the higher elevations, rather than snow.”

Rising waters

When liquids get warmer, they expand. Climate change has lifted global sea levels by an average of nine inches since 1880. El Niño can temporarily raise sea levels a comparable amount, both by heating seawater and by weakening east-to-west oceanic winds, effectively letting the Pacific Ocean slosh up more toward the West Coast of the Americas.

Together, climate change and El Niño could bring record high sea levels, depending on the timing.

“This is sort of a perfect storm, creating a really severe potential hazard for coastal erosion,” McPhaden said.

Some cities will have to make do without the structural fixes of the type seen in Stanwood and Taholah, which can be years in the making.

Hoquiam will have to face this winter’s El Niño without a protective levee that the city has been hoping to build since 2015, when floods devastated the area.

Funding for the work was delayed when the Trump administration canceled the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster-prevention grants program, called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, in April 2025. The agency called the program wasteful, ineffective and politicized.

A federal judge in December ordered the administration to restore the program, and in September, Hoquiam received $35 million. Construction is now set to start in spring of 2027, after king-tide season has passed.

In Seattle’s South Park neighborhood, community leaders expect a long-term fix for flooding there to take another six years.

“We know for sure that until 2032, we will have the sandbagging as a solution,” said Paulina Lopez, head of the Duwamish River Community Coalition.

This winter, South Park plans to rely for a fourth year on a temporary wall of sandbags to keep high Duwamish River waters out of nearby homes. The waterproof wall blocks access to some businesses, so it is put up temporarily each year.

“It can’t be just left in place all the time,” Lopez said.

Seattle officials plan to assemble the sandbag wall in November, before the first king tides arrive.

A survey of South Park residents found they favored “nature-based solutions” to flooding like flood-absorbing wetlands and green roofs, rather than hard structures like sea walls.

“The community didn’t want to see concrete walls,” she said. “Definitely not. Because of who we are as a community, lacking of green spaces.”

Unlike storms or droughts, the most dangerous times for tidal flooding are knowable months or years in advance, making them easier to plan for.

“The good news with that is that we know when the tides are coming. So that’s very predictable,” Bumbaco said.

Double whammy

El Niño has arrived on a planet already abnormally warm due to pollution-caused climate change.

Scientists expect the world to break records, yet again, for the warmest year ever, if not in 2026, then in 2027.

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann likened this El Niño to a wave on top of a wave.

“What this El Niño event will give us is a glimpse of what our future will look like permanently if we fail to reduce carbon emissions and stop the continued warming of the planet,” Mann told the BBC.

That glimpse could be deadly, according to researchers at the University of Chicago. They estimated that extreme heat from the 2026-2027 El Niño would kill 451,000 people, mostly in Africa and Asia, but including 3,500 in the United States.

The 2026 El Niño is expected to bring a 44% increase in extremely hot days, generating conditions expected 20 years from now as the planet overheats beneath a blanket of heat-trapping fossil-fuel pollution.

“El Niño is effectively pushing us into the future — exposing us to temperatures that won’t be the norm for another two decades — before we have time to adapt and protect ourselves,” the University of Chicago researchers wrote.

One silver lining to the potentially dire consequences: El Niño has squashed hurricane formation in the Atlantic Ocean. No Atlantic hurricanes have formed to date in 2026, unlike any year since 1914. But powerful hurricanes are forming in the Pacific, threatening Hawaii and parts of Mexico.

Marine biologists say parts of the Pacific Ocean could turn into a food desert for wildlife, with lowered productivity of plankton making nutrients hard to find for larger organisms like seabirds and salmon.

“They’re in a warmer environment, and then they have to eat more, but what they’re eating has a lower caloric content,” Oregon State University biologist Rachael Orben said. “The impacts of a really strong El Niño might last for multiple years.”

While warmer waters are almost always bad news for cold-water fish like salmon, they often bring warm-water creatures with them. A fisherman 40 miles off of Westport caught an 8-foot striped marlin in September, a rare enough feat that the Chinook Observer called it “the catch of a lifetime.”

John Ryan is a reporter with KUOW. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/10/01/el-nino-could-put-washington-coastal-towns-in-hot-water/