California Surfer Dude Is Unlikely High Quality El Nino Journalist As Pacific Ocean Swamps Coast

Blair Conklin, an unlikely and very good citizen 
journalist, seen here covering record tidal 
flooding Monday in Newport Beach California. 

Sometimes, reliable, related about and well-reported news comes from unlikely sources. Especially these days.  

Meet Blair Conklin, a surfer dude from southern California. He's straight from Central Casting. He's got a big mop of curly blonde, sun-bleached hair. 

What appears to be a perennial tan. He's got that cool dude California vernacular, at least a little bit, when he talks.  Even is first name fits the part. 

Conklin, a native of Laguna Beach, is an accomplished award-winning professional skimboarder and surfer. He's got a very popular YouTube channel called SkidKids, that has 4 million followers and mostly deals with surfing and California beach life. 

Lately, the southern California coast has been swallowed up by El Nino.  The warm water has stirred up numerous hurricanes off the Mexican west coast, sending battering swells long distance into California beaches. 

El Nino has also produced a Kelvin wave, which sharply elevates water levels along the California coast (It brings warm water, which expands compared to cold water.) 

El Nino also is starting to bring storms to southern California. This week, the Kelvin wave combined with unusually high King Tides have caused record flooding. 

And one of the best places to find information about this is Conklin's SkidKids YouTube channel. 

Conklin has been all over this story. 

Lots of media outlets have been covering the wave-battered homes, some of them red-tagged, the crumbling cliffs, the flooded streets and alleys. 

But our surfer Conklin knows his coast, the tidal patterns, how waves behave when they crash onto the coast, how the swells remove sand from the beaches to make the waves that much more destructive. 

The result is some of the best journalism connected to this slowly building California coastal disaster. Right there on his SkidKids channel. He knows the area, and he's good working with a cell phone camera and a drone. 

Conklin shows us how the waves are causing new problems, and worsening old ones. He shows us how abrupt, weird October tropical downpours can flood streets in an instant. He shows how high tide flooding gets around barriers and sand bags.

He even apparently broke some news. Earlier this month, CalTrans shut down one lane of a section of the Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. It seems the public was at first unsure why. Conklin then posted a video showing a large crack had developed on an embankment supporting part of the highway. 

Battering waves had eroded the base of the embankment. Conklin also followed the story as CalTrans put tarps over the embankment, hoping to prevent heavy rains from making the situation worse. 

The news over the past couple of days has been the record tidal flooding, caused by the Kelvin Wave/King Tide one-two punch. 

Earlier today, Conklin took us the the famed Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach, where serious tidal flooding hit despite efforts to building barricades and sandbag walls. It's really a great in-depth video to help us understand what California is facing this fall and winter. 

Not all citizen journalists are that good, of course. They have agendas. They make assumptions. They don't know how to ask good questions. They don't know how to find good, accurate information. But every once in awhile, you get a good one like Conklin. 

I'll be relying on him all winter for weather news from California. Even if I am an old, landlubbing, inland Vermonter who doesn't know the first thing about surfing.