A wall of water as much as 18 feet high rose out of a calm sea and crashed ashore, smashing hundreds of vehicles parked on the beach and causing 75 minor injuries, officials and witnesses said.
An undersea landslide apparently caused the 27-mile-long rogue wave late Friday night, a federal seismologist said Saturday."I saw this huge wall of white water," said Roy Bennett of South Daytona Beach, who was walking on the beach with his wife. "I told my wife to run, and I ran behind her. If we hadn't run, we'd have been pinched in between cars or cars would have been on top of us."
Bennett said he saw people bleeding and many car windows smashed after the water receded. Other witnesses said sailboats were piled on top of vehicles on the drive-on beach. Tow trucks on Saturday pulled out cars shoved under the boardwalk.
The freak wave, estimated at 27 miles long and 250 feet wide, apparently was caused by shifting sands from an underwater landslide, said Frank Baldwin, a senior seismologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Washington, D.C.
Baldwin estimated the wave peaked at 18 feet high. Seas otherwise were 1 to 2 feet at the time, the National Weather Service said.
Undersea landslides are common off Daytona Beach but rarely cause waves of that size, he said.
Authorities ruled out a tidal wave, and no seismic activity was recorded in the Atlantic Ocean at the time, Baldwin said. A weather service meteorologist said it wasn't weather-related.
Damage was concentrated in the area near Daytona Beach's Main Street pier, but the freak wave also pushed water to the sea walls in Ormond Beach and New Smyrna Beach at the north and south ends of Volusia County, said county Chief Beach Ranger John Kirvan.
Kirvan said 75 people suffered minor injuries.