August 2017 (ROTM#104) Zuma Beach, California

This is a rather famous photograph in beach safety and rip current research circles that was thankfully made available by the County of Los Angeles Fire Department. It’s famous because it’s a fantastic example of what is referred to as a ‘flash rip current’ and I say ‘thankful’ because flash rip currents are very common rip currents, but there are relatively few decent pictures of them.

The reason for this is that they are very unpredictable in time and space – what that means is that they don’t last for very long (minutes) and can suddenly develop at seemingly random locations along beaches. They are also hard to spot from the beach because their main visual identified is a plume of sandy and turbulent water heading seaward of the breaking waves. They can only really be seen from above, or from a headland, and even then, they happen so quick it’s often difficult to get a decent photo of them!

Flash rips can occur on any type of beach, but their main characteristic is that they are not channelized, rather they are controlled almost completely by breaking waves. The best way to think of flash rip formation is to imagine a sudden group of large breaking waves building up the water level in the surf zone and pumping the water out as a flash rip. They tend to happen during somewhat messy wave conditions and are impossible to predict in location occurrence. This can make them exceptionally dangerous.

Zuma Beach is near Malibu and is a popular beach and for a bit of scale, see if you can find the person in this picture!

Yikes that person is close to the rip!