Brothers recreate Newport Beach 1982 flood photo 44 years later
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Brothers Chris and Brandon Lisk were ages 5 and 14, respectively, when L.A. Times photographer Thomas Kelsey snapped a photo of them kayaking down a flooded 20th Street next to cars, street signs and sailboats on the Balboa Peninsula on Dec. 31, 1982.
Nearly 44 years later, on Friday, they decided they should get together over the weekend to recreate the photo after seeing news footage of crashing waves spurred by Tropical Storm Rachel and the resulting flooded streets in Newport Beach.
The plan was to return to the site of the original photo and paddle as far as flooded streets would allow. But by the time they arrived at the end of 20th Street Sunday morning, the road was bone dry.
They did find a decent-sized puddle a block over. It was just minutes before Newport Beach Public Works would have finished draining it. The brothers managed to convince a city employee to shut off a pump sucking water back into the bay just long enough to allow the Daily Pilot to snap a few photos.
“We just thought it would be funny to get together and set up, even knowing that it might be on dry land,” Chris Lisk said. “It’ll be funny to have these photos 44 years apart.”
The brothers grew up in a house at 219 20th St. Today, Chris is a resident of Riverside and is the talent buyer for Garden Amp in Garden Grove, while Brandon owns a pool cleaning and repair service in Orange. They often visit their old hometown to go fishing, body surf at the Wedge and take in a meal at one of their favorite haunts.
“We will still occasionally Jump off Lido Bridge and Balboa pier for fun,” Chris Lisk said.
But last Sunday morning was set aside for a different kind of amusement, that of recreating that 1982 Times photo. Their canoe bottomed out on the asphalt underneath their weight and their paddle strokes were shallow, buried hardly an inch into the water, to avoid scraping against the ground. As a result, they didn’t manage to get very far.
But back in December 1982, which was also an El Niño year, a king tide had allowed the ocean to rise above seawalls and fill the streets. The brothers, both lifelong paddlers, figured the weather had done them a favor by bringing the water to them and saving them the trouble of carrying their kayak down from their apartment.
“We wanted to paddle straight out into the bay, because usually you have to lift the kayak up and set it down in the water,” Brandon Lisk recalled. “But by the time we got all set up the tide was starting to come down, so we couldn’t make it over the wall.”
Kelsey, The Times’ photographer, caught them on their way back and asked to photograph them as they made a few passes down the street. The brothers became minor celebrities in their family after the picture was published.
That led to a bit of jealousy, which led their father and cousin to brave the flooded peninsula the following day. They were not as successful. They got down the street and around the block before “cops pulled up next to them and said ‘get that thing out of here!’” Brandon Lisk said with a laugh.
