SAN JOSE — More than one hundred frustrated San Jose flood victims Thursday piled into City Hall to demand answers from Mayor Sam Liccardo and the City Council about why they weren’t warned or evacuated before massive floodwaters engulfed their homes two weeks ago.
One woman said city leaders treated poor flood victims like “used toilet paper.” Another pleaded with them to “put down your phones” and listen to the cries for help. A homeless single mom wept while holding her one-year-old son — they would be sleeping in a shelter that night.
City leaders Thursday took responsibility for a failure to warn or evacuate residents, and vowed to take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. They said San Jose’s Emergency Operations Center didn’t have the resources soon enough to translate flood advisories into multiple languages.
“We know now we should have notified residents sooner, so they could have prepared themselves and their belongings,” said San Jose City Manager Norberto Dueñas. “For that, I’m truly deeply sorry. There have been many moments of wondering what we could have done differently. Unfortunately, in life there is no rewind button … there are no do-overs.”
But Bambi Moise, 72, can’t believe San Jose leaders didn’t see it coming.
“Three weeks ago, I knew there would be a flood,” said Moise, who said she lost much of her North 20th Street home. “It seems you people should have predicted it as well.”
Debbie Miramontes, like many others, got a knock on her door telling her to evacuate hours after contaminated water had already rushed through her home. She came to the public meeting Thursday afternoon to ask the city to help her pay for repairs.
“I just wish the city would have handled it better,” she said.
Officials focused Thursday on several findings: San Jose failed to give timely notice about the need to evacuate, the data it received from the Santa Clara Valley Water District about water levels was flawed, the city needs to improve early warning notifications so people can prepare, and officials need a better way to communicate with “vulnerable” residents who don’t speak English.
“We are committed to better notification, better monitoring and decision-making,” said Assistant City Manager David Sykes, who serves as director of the Emergency Operations Center. The city ordered 14,000 people to evacuate from the flooded areas Feb. 21, and some 200 were still staying in a shelter this week. The waters damaged nearly 600 residential buildings and more than 100 other structures.
San Jose leaders Thursday unveiled a new system to warn residents based on three threat levels: yellow, which means flooding is “possible” and would trigger a flood advisory; orange, which means flooding is “likely” and would trigger a warning; and red, which means flooding is “imminent” and would trigger evacuations.
Officials also said they’re developing a door-to-door outreach plan, ensuring bilingual staff are available for outreach, creating alerts in three languages and a process to notify businesses after hours.
Other recommendations discussed Thursday included ensuring sandbags are available, prioritizing stream maintenance during the dry season, and investing in interim improvements such as temporary flood walls near Rock Springs.
Deputy City Manager Kim Walesh, in a pre-meeting briefing with this newspaper, said the city is “committed to learning from this experience.”
“We cannot have stopped the water from flooding, but could have done more earlier to notify the public about the flood risk that they face,” she said. However, she reiterated what Mayor Sam Liccardo said soon after the flood, that they had been given flawed information from the water district.
“The bottom line is Rock Springs flooded at two-thirds of what we’d been told was the capacity, and William Street at about half capacity,” Walesh said, referring to the hardest-hit areas. “We were relying on the data.”
But, Sykes conceded, San Jose was “overeliant” on the charts, which water district officials say were merely meant to be guidance.
Rick Callender, the water district’s government relations manager, was the only district representative at the meeting Thursday. He said the water district will do “everything in our power to work with government at the federal and state levels … to determine what improvements can be made to reduce the risk of the type of flooding experienced by our community and residents.”
The meeting also addressed a contentious subject between the city and the water district — maintenance of Coyote Creek and where responsibility for creek cleanup lies. The water district says it was San Jose’s job to clean areas it owns.
“The city does own property along the creek, but nothing in the statutes gives the city any duty to maintain the streams or creeks,” City Attorney Rick Doyle responded. “The water district has that ability.”
City spokesman David Vossbrink said that ultimately the work and preparation that stems from this flood can be beneficial to any number of potential future disasters.
“That could be an earthquake, or a bomb, or a tanker truck full of ugly stuff spilling off a freeway,” he said. “We can learn a lot from this — not just about floods, but to have capacity and flexibility on whatever is thrown our way.”
