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Breached Levee Floods Pajaro River Valley, Engulfing Towns as Communities Are Evacuated [1]
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Date: 2023-03
Alejo said the evacuations are continuing and that residents who didn’t leave last night are being escorted out, with vehicles provided by the National Guard and the Salinas Police Department. “We were trying to prepare our residents to be ready for this worst-case scenario. And that moment, unfortunately, has arrived,” he said.
Alejo has already reached out to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the White House, as well as local and state legislators. “When you have flooding, people cannot just return to their homes, because water creates a lot of damage,” Alejo said. “Moisture creates a risk of health hazards such as mold. And so we know that we're going to need to provide alternative housing in the long run for these residents.”
He also said emergency staff are predicting another major atmospheric river storm for Tuesday, meaning that the evacuation and the flooding of the Pajaro River are likely to continue for several days.
Jonathan Linden, reporter for KAZU in Monterey County, said he drove into town on Salinas Road at 2 a.m. When he attempted to drive back the same way less than an hour later, it was submerged in water.
"A county spokesperson told me the entire town is under some level of water, but we can't say exactly how much," said Linden in an interview with KQED on Saturday morning.
Linden said he also spoke with residents on the Watsonville side of the river, which hasn’t flooded. Many residents there had evacuated their homes in the middle of the night, and many had slept in their cars.
One family Linden spoke to spent the night in their car because they couldn’t afford a motel and didn’t want to stay in a shelter. Linden said most of the residents he spoke with are concerned about their homes.
"People are coming together, but we need resources," said Martha Victoria Vega, a resident and teacher in Watsonville, who evacuated her home earlier. "We're grateful for the community members, the public safety teams, nonprofits, government officials and the media for their help."
Under food and safety laws, flooded fields must sit fallow for 30 to 60 days to let any possible contamination subside.
“Food that would otherwise have been grown and harvested will not be available. And also the thousands of jobs that would be available to farmworkers will not be available,” said Alejo, of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors.
KQED’s Katherine Monahan spoke with Ramiro Ortiz Calderon while he stood by the river with his wife and daughter. His house flooded, and so did his car, which he would have needed to get to work. Now, he thinks he’ll have no work. And, he’s worried about theft.
"After we returned two months ago, I came back to the house, and there was a lot of vandalism, they stole the tires from my car," Calderon said, in Spanish. "Let [the police] protect us at least now that we are outside so that there is not so much robbery because we have our things there. It's not so much about the water, but rather our belongings, the little that we have, inside."
Despite evacuation orders, some families and residents chose not to leave their homes.
“It's really sad to see that people didn't evacuate last night,” said Alfredo Torres, a local insurance agent and Pajaro resident. “They didn't heed the warnings and people chose to stay. I understand in a community like ours, there's not a whole lot of housing. So it is limited where people can go, as it is in a highly populated area.”
Torres said the levee system had “never been built to capacity.”
“It was built back in the '40s, and I think the bigger problem is just that there's been a lack of focus on maintenance to better it,” he said. “Some [projects] were supposed to be coming down the pipeline soon, but not soon enough.”
Built in 1949, the Pajaro River’s levees have broken several times in the past decades, causing flooding and widespread damage to communities. In 1995, flooding from broken levees left two people dead and thousands of acres of farmland underwater, and caused close to $100 million in damage. In 2022, a state law was passed to advanced state funds for a levee project. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2024.
The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, North Monterey County Fire and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said in a statement on March 1 that they are currently assisting community members who did not evacuate earlier.
The California National Guard said they conducted 56 rescues of people who were stranded by the flooding throughout the night.
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[1] Url:
https://www.kqed.org/news/11943316/pajaro-river-levee-breached-where-to-find-evacuation-shelters
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