This is on point. I'm Magna Chakrabardi. Imperial Beach is the southern most beach town on the California coast. It's right up against the Mexican border.

Former Mayor Serge Dadeena describes it this way.

It's the last really blue collar, funky beach town left in southern California. We're a majority minority community. It's four square miles surrounded by water really on all four sides.

It's not exactly an island, but Imperial Beach was developed in the early 1900s and it's built on filled in mud flats surrounded to the south by the Tijuana estuary and to the north by the wetlands of San Diego Bay.

And of course to the west. There's the Pacific Ocean. Dadeena has seen some very high tides surge on Imperial Beach over the years, but it was one day in the winter of 2018 that sticks most in his mind.

Forecasters had predicted king tides, those super high tides that coincide with a new or full moon.

So the surf was very short interval 8 to 10 foot. I saw something I hadn't really seen in a long time or something I'd seen during hurricane swells and the tropics. The ocean was angry.

And with my lifelong friend Robert Stabenow, who was the lifeguard chief, we've been spent the last 45 years surfing these waves, lifeguarding together.

And then he saw these wall of water coming at us just like this wall of water that I was actually filming and then just got it developed in it.

That's the sound that Dadeena recorded of that wall of water. He was at the south end of the beach where the streets and developments end.

And he watched the sea water come up over the dunes, flood a parking lot and flow into the neighboring estuary.

A lot of guys were like, you should block it up and one guy started trying to shovel sand into it.

But I've seen California state parks. They get bulldozers and they they bulldoze up the berms to stop flooding.

And this year we had some big surf and it just wiped it all out overnight.

The Dadeena says Imperial Beach is lucky to have some natural estuaries that can absorb some of the flooding.

However, some estimates show the Pacific ocean rising more than six feet by the next century.

Dadeena says Imperial Beach could see a one-third of the town disappear in the coming decades.

Now those King Tides and coastal flooding that served Dadeena experienced as mayor forced him to switch his focus from town improvements like fixing the librarian, putting in new sidewalks,

to investing in cleaning up and preparing for future King Tides.

Similar sudden rethinking is happening up and down California's 1200 miles of coastline.

If you turned California on its side and stretched out those 1200 miles of coastline, it would reach from New York City all the way to Little Rock, Arkansas.

It's that long and that varied.

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