Remember the wide and gracious sweep of Broad Beach, a strip of sand in northern Malibu lined with mega-mansion$? For years there's been a simmering feud between homeowners and beach goers over where the public/private dividing line actually is.

A few years back, some Broad Beach homeowners hired bulldozers to build up the dunes in front of the row of houses. Illegal. The county promptly ordered them to hire bulldozers to put the sand back where it had been. The place kind of looked the same, but not quite.

Now, (and who knows whether the whole bulldozer fiasco had anything to do with it, but my cousin, who has lived on Broad Beach since the 1970s, says she's never seen anything like this) now, the tides are sweeping all the way up to people's yards, up to their houses, even on the broadest sweep of the formerly broad beach.