Jack Kimmich refers to himself as a bacon farmer. He says he does this because “pig farmer” conjures up all sorts of unsavory images with which he would rather not be associated . He has been raising prized Berkshire hogs near San Felipe Road on 30 acres for a number of years and, until the rains came on Jan. 10, he wasn’t too concerned about the nearby Pacheco Creek that meanders north of his property.
That all changed at 1:30 in the morning on Jan. 11 when his neighbor called in a panic. The single mom with five children told him water was flowing into her home. She had called 9-1-1, and moved what she could up to the second story, but she wasn’t sure what to do next.
“I opened up our bedroom window and there was a raging river,” Kimmich said. “I went outside and I had the fire truck and another truck that were on lower ground, so I moved those up to high ground.”
“It was really scary,” said Jack’s wife, Sara. “I didn’t think one of them was going to make it up.”
Kimmich, who has a trucking business, has worked in landscaping, and provides water with his fire truck for firefighting, has several large vehicles on the property. More than one came in handy over the next few days. But it was dicey that first morning.
“I got in the loader, which has big tires, and I thought I’d drive down and see how far on the other side of our waterway it (flood) was,” he said. “I got to where it was half way up the tires and thought I might not have a road to drive on. I had to back out.”
Debris quickly backed up and the water came over the creek bank, five feet above the normal water level of a nearby lake and a thousand feet wide.
“That came through the three homes in front of us and wiped out arenas, fencing and everything else,” Kimmich said. “Then it came through the lower sections of our waterway.”
The next day, the water was still flowing. Kimmich said he wouldn’t risk driving his pickup through it. According to Kevin O’Neill, director of San Benito County Emergency Services, over the next few weeks there were five separate floods. Kimmich said, for his property, the first one was the worst.
“We knew about the others in advance and had time to do something,” he said. “After the first flood, our road was pretty much wiped out. A tree had gone over and it knocked some boulders into our culvert. I had to dig a whole new culvert and put in 30 feet of pipe. I raised the road level going over the waterway by about a foot. We lost six feet of our road from erosion. Had the event gone on another six hours, my whole road going over the waterway would have been gone.”
The waters swept away nearly 50 percent, or a mile, of Kimmich’s three-wire, electrified fencing and posts. The water also washed away about 125 tons of beets. Bags of feed were contaminated and had to be composted. They also have three shipping containers where he stored household goods, antiques and building materials that were damaged.
The tight-knit little community quickly came together to help one another. It didn’t hurt that Kimmich had some heavy equipment at his command, especially when it came to hauling sandbags and rocks.
“I told the neighbors I’m taking my big truck over to the airport and we’ll load up sandbags and said ‘if you want us to sandbag your house, join us,’” he said. “We had a bunch of people show up and we carried about 12 tons of sandbagged homes.”
Kimmich said there was a lot more water from the second flood, but the water level dropped faster afterwards. He said county public works fixed a back-flooding drainage pipe that was causing a geyser of water to shoot three feet up through a manhole, sending the heavy cover flying.
“I have these one-and-a-half ton concrete blocks and was going to set it on the manhole, which probably wasn’t too smart,” Kimmich said, “but public works came over there and sealed it.”
Kimmich said he helped one neighbor whose driveway had washed away.
The view from Kimmich’s loader as he drives along washed out road.
“I went down with a loader and so much water was pouring through where his driveway used to be and I dug it out so the water could flow through a channel and around his house,” Kimmich said. “We dug up his driveway to make it deeper and pushed all his landscaping up against the breach that was coming around his house and diverted the water. His house had a conditional red tag on it and if he couldn’t get the water level down, his house would be declared uninhabitable. But the next day, the water level went down. I also hauled about 100 tons of rock from the Aromas quarry for another neighbor’s driveway.
Like so many of Kimmich’s neighbors, he had no flood insurance.
“We were required to have flood insurance the first two years we lived there,” Sara said. “It was ridiculously expensive. I think the premium was $11,000 a year. And the exclusions were never-ending. After two years, they told us we didn’t have to have flood insurance. They said our house isn’t in the flood plain. Fortunately, the water didn’t come up there.”
When it came to the pigs, Sara said they’re pretty smart animals and no one had to tell them to head for higher ground.
Sara Kimmich cuddles a piglet that was nearly swept away by flood waters.
“We use a lot of compost and the pigs really like it. It’s great for their bedding,” she said. “We have some pretty high mounds of it, plus truckloads of walnuts, so they had high, dry mounds they could be on. They instinctively knew to go up there.”
There are quite a few people who follow Kimmich on Facebook and know about his pigs. Some became concerned when they mistook a photo he posted with the intention of reassuring them.
It was a good idea that went wrong,” Sara said. “There was a high mound of walnut shells and the pigs were sleeping on it the next day. Some were sleeping right at the water’s edge. Jack published that on Facebook and people were going, ‘oh no, the pigs are dead.’ They were just napping and we were just trying to reassure people the pigs were fine.”
Not all the pigs were so fortunate, though, and Kimmich had to intervene to pull off a rescue.
“Around 3 p.m., the water was flowing and we spotted this sow walking through water up to her chest and then we heard this little squeal and there’s this little baby swimming and trying to follow her,” he said. “It was getting carried away, so we ran out there and snagged it and brought it in the house. We gave it a hot bath. It was in the house for about three hours and we put it in a box by the fireplace.”
With up to 200 pigs roaming free-range style on the farm, it’s hard to know how many casualties there were, but some animals did not make it through the first flood.
“We know we lost some,” Sara said. “The mothers think they’re (piglets) following them and they simply couldn’t keep up with the bigger animals. Some of them got washed away.”
Even though the waters have receded, new problems continue to surface.
“There are springs everywhere coming up through the ground,” Kimmich said. “I had to shut our windmill off because our tanks are still overflowing because there is so much surface hydraulic pressure.”
Kimmich markets pork under the California Kurobuta label, which is in high demand by area chefs and restaurants. Production has been set back about a month.
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