It's one thing to hear about this week's dangerously high surf, it's another to see it in action, especially when that action is happening inside a nearby costal restaurant.
As previously reported, Monterey Bay saw record-breaking waves of over 34 feet this weekend, and two were killed in the high surf off 17 Mile Drive in Pebble Beach. A rogue wave also took out a Pacifica restaurant early Saturday, flooding the first floor of the venue.
It all went down at around 5:15 Saturday at Pacifica's Moonraker restaurant, which overlooks the coast at Rockaway Beach. According to CBS 5, when staff arrived to open on Saturday, they discovered the restaurant’s banquet hall filled with broken glass and water.
“I don’t know if it was from the wind or a rock came through the window," owner Gary McNamara told CBS 5. "So we went to our surveillance camera and pulled the footage back up and obviously it was something more serious than that." Here's (after the bit with the news anchors) what they saw:
As you can see, the wave crashes through at least one of the restaurant windows — for the first time ever, McNamara says.
KRON 4 reports that the wave also destroyed a food truck parked nearby, and, CBS 5 says, caused between $10,000 and $15,000 to the banquet room, as the carpets and furniture in the flooded room must be replaced.
“Initially it broke the window and then a bunch of water came through and then more water piled through again and that’s a huge wave,” McNamara says. “The windows shattered. I mean glass just went everywhere and the room filled up with water pretty quickly.”
“I’ve seen how big the waves get out here they crash at the sea wall. But that’s concerning, it has a clear 30-40 feet of concrete."
Previously: High Surf Claims Three Lives As Storm Floods Bay Area Roads