When the worst of the flooding was over Tuesday, the rampaging Coyote Creek submerged a San Jose neighborhood, forcing emergency crews in rescue boats to save 246 shocked and frantic people trapped in chest-high water in their homes.
Five homeless people clinging to trees near the Los Lagos Golf Course in South San Jose were rescued, and a north San Jose mobile home park was inundated. River waters in Naglee Park flooded about 10 historic homes and forced a mandatory evacuation late Tuesday night of the area between S. 16th Street to Highway 101, on both sides of E. Santa Clara Street. A northbound section of Highway 101 near Morgan Hill was shut down. With rising waters, 28 horses were stranded at Cooksy Family Stables in South San Jose and at nearby Happy Hollow Park & Zoo in San Jose, ring-tailed lemurs, a tortoise and a cockatoo were moved to higher ground.
In the East Bay, an uprooted tree hit two homes in Danville while flooding and mudslides kept Niles Canyon Road between Fremont and Sunol closed for a second day.
After five years of drought, the wettest winter in 20 years is wreaking havoc throughout the Bay Area as residents coped with flood alerts, downed trees, evacuations, power outages and unpredictable commutes. This week’s flooding in San Jose has been caused by the overflowing Anderson Reservoir near Morgan Hill. Coyote Creek, which flows from the reservoir, was expected to surpass the highest flow rates ever recorded since 1950 when Anderson Dam was built.
With clear skies forecast Wednesday through Friday, is all this chaos behind us?
“We’re not done yet,” meteorologist Steve Anderson of the National Weather Service said Tuesday evening.
Heavy rains are expected again Saturday through Monday, Anderson said.
“That means more flooding, more mudslides, more trees down — more of the same,” Anderson said.
San Jose city officials declared a local emergency Tuesday, while Mayor Sam Liccardo expressed frustration that the rescued residents — from nearly 500 houses and apartments near Senter Road and Phelan Avenue — were caught by surprise. He called the flood the result of a “unique breach” of Coyote Creek that the water district would pinpoint.
“As I sit here today and look at a neighborhood that is completely inundated with water where we have fire crews doing whatever they can to get people out, there’s no question in my mind there was a failure of some kind,” Liccardo said. “We’ll have plenty of time for ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ in the days ahead. Right now, we’ve got to do whatever we can to get people out.”
Tuesday night, residents of Naglee Park, a tight-knit neighborhood of historic homes near downtown, were already angry that they weren’t given better notice about the potential of severe flooding. Sandy Moll, whose house on South 16th Street near William Street Park flooded, said she had prepared for about a foot of water, but no more. The force of the water from the creek that runs behind her house broke down her back door.
“My furniture is floating in the garden. The sandbags were three feet high and the water bowled those over,” Moll said as she stood with neighbors on the street looking at the rising waters at 9:30 p.m. “If anyone said two or three days ago that this could be as bad or worse than 20 years ago — I’m seething. It’s the lack of information and forewarning when they had to have known. They never even said you need to prepare for a major flood.”
San Jose Fire Capt. Mitch Matlow said that multiple agencies, including county emergency services, created an “incident action plan” a week ago to prepare for the impacts of the storm, including flooding. Emergency crews doubled the numbers of employees on duty, he said, and homeless encampments were forewarned about the potential for rising waters.
“The piece that wasn’t clear,” Matlow said, “was where exactly is this going to happen.”
The scene at the submerged neighborhood Tuesday morning was chaotic. Esaul Perez, 32, was at work as a landscaper when his wife called from their apartment about 9:30 a.m.
“The water is everywhere. It’s coming up really fast!” Perez’s wife, Yesenia, told him. “She was crying. The water was waist high.”
She had already tried to start her car, a Jetta, but it had flooded. She retreated to her house until her husband returned by 9:45 a.m. He was turned away by emergency crews, he said, so he jumped a fence and waded through the water. He and his wife gathered up some clothes that they held in bags over their head until the rescue boats arrived at their door by 10 a.m.
Once on dry land, residents were sprayed down with clean water. Firefighters have been decontaminating anyone with significant exposure to waters from Coyote Creek because it was filled with debris from nearby homeless encampments and other unknowns.
Evacuees were taken to shelters at the Shirakawa and Roosevelt community centers. An overnight shelter was also set up at James Lick High School.
Along with the 10 flooded homes in Naglee Park, the entire William Street Park at the end of South 16th Street was flooded.
“It’s just amazing. You think for four years we’ve been complaining there’s no water and all of a sudden we live on a lake,” said Anne Sconberg, who usually looks out to the grassy William Street Park but it was submerged Tuesday night. “The scary thing is trees are falling down. Two big oak trees went down with a thud.”
She couldn’t get out of her house if she tried, she said.
“We would need a boat,” she said. San Jose State students who parked in front of her house in the morning came back in the afternoon to cars submerged up to their doors, she said.
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Also Tuesday, police ordered the evacuation of 300 Santa Clara County employees from two facilities just south of the flooded neighborhood.
“Up until this storm we have had room in Anderson Reservoir to capture flood waters. Now there is no more room,” water district spokesman Marty Grimes said. “There’s no more space for us to capture it. A lot of rain has fallen on a very saturated watershed.”
The waters in the submerged neighborhood in south San Jose peaked at about 6 p.m., but the South Bay Mobile Home Park on Oakland Road in San Jose had more water to come as the flood waters headed north. One resident was rescued from the top of his submerged vehicle.
“We’re got water pouring through the retaining wall right now,” Matlow said around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
More than 100 people had already been evacuated from that mobile home park as well as two others nearby.
The torrent of water also flooded Highway 101 at Cochrane Road in Morgan Hill, closing all three northbound lanes at 9:30 a.m. A parking garage at Mineta San Jose International Airport was also flooded.
Highway 17 connecting Silicon Valley to the coast continued to have troubles Tuesday. Although both northbound lanes were opened Tuesday after a mudslide two weeks ago closed one of them, a southbound lane remained closed.
Guadalupe River in downtown San Jose, a waterway that historically flooded many times in past generations, stayed within its banks Tuesday as water poured into a concrete overflow channel near Santa Clara Street downtown that was constructed a decade ago.
The “atmospheric river” storm that pounded the Bay Area on Monday continued to deliver impressive rainfall totals throughout the region, according to the National Weather Service.
As of 4 p.m. Tuesday, the 24-hour rain totals for the Santa Cruz Mountains was 1.97 inches, Oakland .87, Martinez .80, San Francisco .57, and San Jose .53.
The season totals since October were 23.05 inches for Oakland, 15.10 for San Jose, and 25.77 for San Francisco.
