Back in the Day...

...There was another street and one more block of land in town plots west of 5th Street in Encinitas, according to W.H. Berger in his book Walk Along the Ocean*. According to an 1883 tax assessor's map, there were also three streets in the area that is now Moonlight Beach. The two blocks of blufftop land that has since eroded into the ocean was, as far as I can tell, only undeveloped land that was legally platted for development. The 1889 winter storms, which Berger suggests were around the same time as the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption, upset the inland Cottonwood Creek reservoir and flooded the coastal area with destructive water forces.  In his book Sea Cliffs, Beaches, and Coastal Valleys in San Diego: Some Amazing Histories and Some Horrifying Implications, Gerald Kuhn suggests that the cliffs around Encinitas and Moonlight Beach retreated more than 600 feet between 1883 and 1891.

Imagine what a rise in sea level from another large volcano or global warming might do, or a commensurate rainfall today in light of the urban stormwater runoff complications added since the 1889 storms.

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*Walk Along the Ocean is also available in a free electronic version from UCSD's SSH library, including a PDF version for easy printing.  The UCSD SSH library also has an electronic version of a more detailed study of local geology--Gerald Kuhn's Sea Cliffs, Beaches, and Coastal Valleys in San Diego: Some Amazing Histories and Some Horrifying Implications.  Click on the eScholarship version of this book (free) for a printable copy.  I want to thank Mark Wisniewski of the Encinitas Environmental Committee for telling me about these publications.