MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Six passengers from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak arrived Friday in Australia for a quarantine expected to last at least three weeks.
The Gulfstream long-range business jet carrying them from the Netherlands landed at RAAF Base Pearce outside the Western Australia state capital, Perth. The passengers, crew and a doctor who accompanied them were taken by bus to the nearby Bullsbrook quarantine facility.
Australian Health Minister Mark Butler said the government would implement one of world's strongest quarantine responses to the outbreak.
He said passengers of the cruise ship MV Hondius who returned to the United States and most European countries would spend a few days in a quarantine center before they were sent home.
"We have taken the decision to take a stronger approach to quarantine arrangements than that because we are determined to ensure there is no risk at all of any transmission of this virus into the Australian community,” Butler told reporters in his hometown of Adelaide.
The five Australians and one New Zealand citizen will spend the three-week quarantine period in the facility that had remained largely unused since it was built in 2022 is response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A decision had yet to be made on what precautions should be taken for the remainder of the 42-day period of potential incubation that the World Health Organization had identified, Butler said.
The six passengers all tested negative for the virus before they left the Netherlands, had been assessed by a doctor during the flight and would undergo more detailed health assessments at Bullsbrook, Butler said.
In America, health officials transferred the two passengers who were originally sent to Atlanta to the National Quarantine Center in Omaha on Thursday. Nebraska Medicine spokeswoman Kayla Thomas said those two were medically cleared to move to the facility here at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, but she wouldn't say whether they tested negative.
Thomas said that health officials were comfortable bringing all the passengers here to Omaha now that no one is being treated in the hospital’s biocontainment unit. Initially one of the passengers had been placed there after he tested positive on the ship, but he has since tested negative for hantavirus.
The MV Hondius ship was on a cruise from Argentina to the Antarctic and then to several isolated islands in the South Atlantic Ocean when the hantavirus outbreak was identified. Three people among the 11 cases from the ship have died.
With the evacuation of all passengers and many crew members completed, the MV Hondius is now sailing back to the Netherlands, where it will be cleaned and disinfected.
Passengers from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius are driven in a bus after they arrived in Perth, Australia, from the Netherlands on Friday, May 15, 2026. (Aaron Bunch/AAP Image via AP)
A jet carrying passengers from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius arrives at RAAF Base Pearce in Perth, Australia, from the Netherlands on Friday, May 15, 2026. (Aaron Bunch/AAP Image via AP)
SEATTLE (AP) — Sea levels along the West Coast will begin to rise by up to a foot this month as a series of pulses of warm water called Kelvin waves hit the shoreline and move north, sparking concerns about beach erosion and flooding in areas already impacted by climate change and El Niño.
Kelvin waves are not like tsunamis, and they don't curl over and crash on the beach. A better image is water sloshing in the bathtub or a swimming pool during an earthquake. In the ocean, they are bulges of water that lift the sea level as they move along the coast. They're common during El Niño events, but this year’s super El Niño could intensify the impacts, experts say.
Over the next week, the 6-inch to foot-tall surge will move north along the California coast at about 6 miles per hour (9.6 kilometers per hour), or 150 miles per day (241 kilometers per day), bringing higher sea levels to Oregon and Washington state. Experts predict the waves will continue to pass through from October until February.
“It’s not that this Kelvin wave is going to come and flood anything on its own,” said Michael Jacox, a research oceanographer with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries’ Ecosystem Science Division.
Instead, it raises the baseline.
If you start with sea levels that are 6 inches higher than normal, when you have really high tides, big storms or storm surges, the water levels are now 6 inches higher, he said. “The effects can be amplified,” he said.
The waves also increase ocean temperatures and push cold, nutrient-rich waters deeper below the surface, which has an impact on marine life.
Here's what to know about Kelvin waves.
Kelvin waves are a “fact of life” during an El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern involving the warming ocean waters, said Dillon Amaya, an assistant professor in the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University.
They form when the trade winds along the equator change direction.
Winds blowing east to west along the equator push water in the Pacific Ocean west toward Asia, Jacox said. When those winds weaken or reverse direction, that bulge of water gets pushed back toward the east along the equator until it hits South America.
When the surge of water hits the coastline at the equator, it moves north and south along the North and South American coasts.
The wave isn't visible to the naked eye and they won't cause boats to go up and down, Amaya said. It's more like a big pancake. It's wider than it's deep: The bulge extends 12 to 20 miles (19 to 32 kilometers) off the coast and about 200 meters deep, Amaya said.
Many coastal communities are already grappling with the impacts of rising sea levels, like the coastal erosion eating away at the beach in San Clemente, California. Waves are also getting bigger, experts say.
The higher sea levels could exacerbate those problems.
“People are on edge,” Amaya said. “They think about more flooding happening, more beach erosion so when you hear elevated sea states coastal inundation risk, I think that raises a lot of anxiety.”
The higher sea level combined with larger than average waves from North Pacific swell, which are expected during the El Niño, plus large spring tides from October to February, can cause exceptional erosion on the West Coast, said Sean Vitousek, a research oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Generally, the largest El Niño events of 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 caused West Coast beaches to experience their worst erosion on record, Vitousek said.
“The loss of protective beaches also increases wave impacts and coastal flooding on property and infrastructure,” he said.
Things could intensify over time as more waves arrive over the winter.
Typically El Niños are associated with five or six of these waves, Amaya said. During the last major El Niño in 2015-2016 there were five Kelvin waves.
One already came through in May or June and there’s evidence of a third Kelvin wave forming, he said. Experts expect it to continue up the coast over the next month or so.
There's concern the waves could worsen challenges along the Southern California coast, said Alyssa Napuri, deputy chief of staff for Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley. Already, waves are approaching a seaside rail line and oceanfront homes were damaged during swells last month tied to Hurricane Marie.
Authorities are placing emergency sand on beaches as quickly as possible, Napuri said, adding that forecasts show the Kelvin Wave could send water levels between six to 12 inches higher.
“We’re already struggling as it is,” Napuri said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, proclaimed a state of emergency in late September to prepare the state for what will likely be a historic El Niño season. The proclamation will help the state “move faster to protect communities, stage critical resources, and strengthen readiness before severe weather intensifies,” the governor said in a statement.
Experts with the Washington state Department of Natural Resources are ready to respond to any disasters that might come with the Kelvin waves, said spokesperson Courtney James. They regularly coordinate through the state Emergency Management Division but they have not been asked to do any special preparation so far, she said.
Actual damages from the Kelvin waves will depend on the storms and tides magnified by El Niño, and if they're stronger, the damage could be significant, Amaya said.
“It’s too too early to be sure whether this particular winter season will be a record breaker in terms of this El Niño, but this El Niño itself is certainly on that trajectory of being one of the largest if not the largest El Niño we’ve ever seen," he said.
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Associated Press reporter Amy Taxin contributed to this story from Santa Ana, California.
A hiker walks along Shi Shi Beach on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, Sept. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag)
Driftwood sits on a beach beach near Queets on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, Sept. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag)
Surfers enter the Pacific Ocean as the sun sets Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026, in Encinitas, Calif. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
