SAN JOSE — As hundreds of frustrated residents returned home Thursday to begin cleaning up the damage from the worst South Bay flooding in decades, water district officials said they tried to warn city officials in the hours before Coyote Creek spilled into neighborhoods that potentially destructive flows would arrive within three to four hours.
Santa Clara Valley Water District officials said they alerted the city at 2:47 a.m. Tuesday that heavy flows would arrive downtown between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. — about an hour before the first reports of distress began bubbling and homeless people desperately climbed trees to escape rising waters near the Los Lagos Golf Course.
“When we notice something’s going on and say that within three hours the area will be inundated, it doesn’t mean that after three hours you can start preparing,” said Director Tony Estremera, who represents part of the area that was flooded.
Mayor Sam Liccardo said Thursday he had not seen the district’s email and did not want to comment on it specifically. The mayor said earlier this week that the city relied on information from the water district that indicated the creek could handle 7,400 cubic feet of water a second. That data, he said, turned out to be wrong, and residents should not have learned of the flood danger when rescuers arrived by boat to evacuate them.
“I don’t doubt the water district tried their best to get us accurate information and the information was changing rapidly,” Liccardo said Thursday. “And we’re not trying to point fingers here, but some of the emails that they sent that morning were wrong.”
Meanwhile, about 3,800 residents — down from 14,000 — remain affected by mandatory evacuations around William Street Park, the Rock Springs neighborhoods southeast of downtown and two mobile home parks along Old Oakland Road.
Others, however, returned home to begin the long process of cleaning up. Weary and worried, they wanted answers.
“They never told us whether we could come back or not. We just did,” William Street resident Jolene Noel said as her 9-year-old daughter swept their driveway and water was pumped from her basement. “They also didn’t tell us when to leave.”
Noel said she wants “real answers” about what happened, but so far has heard “we’ll get back to you.”
“I’d like to know who’s responsible,” she said. “These are people’s lives at stake.”
City officials, meanwhile, are scrambling for state and federal aid to help with cleanup efforts. More rain is expected this weekend, and the city plans to launch a local assistance center Saturday at Shirakawa Community Center, 2072 Lucretia Ave., which they described as a “multiagency, one-stop center for residents and businesses who have been flooded to obtain help.”
In the email sent by the water district hours before the flooding began, officials told the city that the water in the creek was flowing at 6,000 cubic feet per second, earlier than expected, and could rise to 7,000 cubic feet per second and remain there “for a number of hours” and could reach the Rock Springs neighborhood by 6 or 7 a.m. “Are you planning some specific communication related to that?” wrote Jim McCann of the water district.
“I’ll head back in about 5am to check on whether we should further update outreach,” wrote Cheryl Wessling of the city’s Office of Emergency Operations in an email sent at 3:06 a.m. Tuesday. “Is this a minor or major change in what we were expecting?”
McGann responded: “I would say relatively minor, in that it’s a few hours earlier than previously forecast. Heightened awareness, in that if notifying or communicating to the neighborhoods is in the works, it may reach flood levels earlier than expected, too.”
Water district director Dick Santos said the surge should have sounded alarm bells.
“Look, those areas are hot-spots,” he said Thursday. “Anywhere south of Trimble Road, they all can flood down there and they have flooded, and we know that if a lot of water is coming, it can flood again.
“We did our part — it’s our job to watch the water,” he said. “We don’t send in the police and fire.”
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Why the water level flooded at a much lower rate than anticipated could be related to the drought coming to an end with a year that’s on track to be the wettest on record.
“You’ll see vegetation growing out where the water used to be,” said Anthony Guerriero, field office chief for the water division of the U.S. Geological Survey. “There’ll be trees out there, and they love it. And debris is not being washed out.”
Water district spokeswoman Rachael Gibson said the district has a program that keeps the creeks and water channels clear — but only those on water district property. That amounts to about 250 miles out of the 800 miles of county waterways. Gibson said it doesn’t include the stretch of Coyote Creek at Rock Springs, which was hit hardest by the flooding.
“The city of San Jose owns the creek in that area,” she said, “and each property owner is responsible for clearing their own section.”
San Jose officials on Thursday said they didn’t know if they owned the area, and said researching the matter would take several days. “Our priority is getting people back into their homes,” Vossbrink said.
VIDEO: Mayor @sliccardo pledges better emergency notification and plans to seek state financial relief for flood-weary residents@mercnews pic.twitter.com/4ir1Gct64e
— Robert Salonga (@robertsalonga) February 24, 2017
Assistant City Manager Dave Sykes disagreed with the water district’s assessments and said who does the clean up and maintenance “is an open question.”
“And it’s premature to come to any conclusion that blockage could have caused the flooding,” he said.
Most of the area still under mandatory evacuation sits within a FEMA-designated 100-year floodplain. According to the agency, that means that in any given year there’s a 1 percent chance of a flood.
But water district spokeswoman Gina Adriano said the impacted spots “are low-lying areas prone to flooding during storms much less intense than a 100-year storm.”
That’s another area of disagreement: While the city has labeled the storm a 100-year event, the water district has not. Guerriero of the USGS said that while the flow of Coyote Creek was the highest on record going back to 1991 — he “would not consider this a 100-year event.”
Meanwhile, San Jose Councilman Tam Nguyen, whose district includes Rock Springs, said Vietnamese residents and other ethnic communities were ignored by the city and that no multilingual information was disseminated. Packets with information in Spanish and Vietnamese were distributed on Thursday.
“People are frustrated and afraid of the unknown. They would love to hear what help they can get,” Nguyen said. “Today, for the first time, I heard the city is working on it. They should have done it before to give people some assurance.”
Liccardo said the city has taken to heart the scores of resident complaints about getting little to no evacuation notice before they were surrounded by rising waters.
“It’s safe to say we’ve learned some lessons, and we’re going to be knocking on doors to make sure everybody is aware of what’s going on as soon as it’s apparent there is some peril.”
Staff writers Robert Salonga and Paul Rogers contributed to this report.
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