When Christine Smith swung her feet out of bed at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday to head for the bathroom, she was shocked when she found herself standing in two feet of frigid water. She did not know that nearby Pacheco Creek had overflowed its banks and was flooding homes along Lovers Lane, crushing fences and threatening livestock.
Smith and her husband, Fernando Ruiz, live in a small rental home at 7470 Lovers Lane.
“I called 9-1-1, and then woke up my landlord,” she said. “Luckily, we were able to get our truck out of the driveway and we went into town. We got some rubber boots and came back to see if I could find my cat.”
Smith and Ruiz walked along a muddy driveway to their rental home in back of where their landlord lives and found the water had receded. Just before entering the home, there was a plaintive “meow,” and she spotted her cat huddled high and dry on top of a wood pile. Inside, there was at least two inches of water throughout their small home. The one material item she was concerned about saving, a small, flat-screen TV, was undamaged. The two appeared somewhat subdued as they faced the cleanup ahead.
Rich Hogeman works as an auto mechanic in San Jose and has lived in the area for the past 40 years. He drove BenitoLink down Lovers Lane through the flooding, and over Pacheco Creek until forced to stop by the rapid flow of water crossing the road and into surrounding open land. He pointed to a home surrounded by water and said the owner had just purchased it for more than $800,000. He said the flooding was the worst he had seen in 25 years, and that it was entirely preventable.
“The county doesn’t keep the creek clean anymore,” he said. “It’s been 20 years or more since they’ve removed trees in the creek bed, so all the debris backs up and breaks the levy.”
Hogeman said when he was a kid, he and his buddies could walk the length of the creek bed, which he said was twice as deep as it is now, from Lovers Lane all the way up into the Pacheco Pass to Casa De Fruta.
At the rescue center, located inside the Veterans’ Memorial Building in downtown Hollister, Bianca Vasquez said her family of eight that lives along Lovers Lane had just returned from Mexico. She said everyone was asleep at 2 a.m. when her mother rushed in shouting for them to get up because there was a flood all around them.
“I have four younger sisters, so we all got up and my dad went outside and all this water was flooding inside our house,” she said. “We saw our neighbors were packing and trying to get inside their car. They were trying to get it started, but it just wouldn’t move. About five minutes later, the firefighters came to our rescue.”
At first, they asked the firefighters if they could stay. Initially, the firefighters said they could, but only a minute or so later, they came back and said the family had to leave. Vasquez said they came to the evacuation center around 5 a.m. and that the local Red Cross volunteers provided them with hot coffee, juice and food. She said San Benito County Supervisor Mark T. Medina came by and said he would call emergency services to see when they could return to their home.
Medina said he had been in contact with Kevin O’Neill, emergency services manager at the San Benito County Office of Emergency Services, offering to help in any way he could, but wanted to stay out of the way of the professionals.
“I told him if there’s anything I can do, I’m at his beck and call,” Medina said.
David Guttirez, a local volunteer with the Red Cross, said he was contacted at 1 a.m., Wednesday, about flooding.
“Right now, we have 19 clients in there (at the vets’ building) and we have 10 more on the way,” he said. “We have cots set up and food for them. We’re just going to accommodate them the best we can.”
As many as 45 people showed up during the early morning hours, but some had already left to be with other family members in the area. Guttirez said mental health officials would be coming afterward to advise people what to do next.
“This is a long process,” he said. “If they pay rent, we will try to negotiate with the landlords to get some of their money back. We’re all volunteers with the Red Cross and we’re just trying to help them however we can.”
The Office of Emergency Services command post had been set up behind the Dunneville Café & Market, where O’Neill said his office responded to calls at 2 a.m., and immediately realized there would need to be some evacuations. He said at 8 a.m. that the swift-water rescue team that came from San Jose had rescued and evacuated 34 people.
“We don’t have an estimate yet of how many addresses we have evacuated and how many are pending,” he said. “We anticipate operations continuing another couple hours.”
When questioned about the possibility that as many as 53 people had been rescued, he said he had heard that number primarily from the media.
“We’ve only evacuated 34 people,” he insisted. “And that’s using the boats, the fire engines, as well as the search-and-rescue team. Perhaps people went straight to the evacuation center from work or another location, but our count remains 34.”
O’Neill explained that the rising water did not exceed three or four feet.
“This started out with a few individuals in a car who were trapped,” he said. “Their car stalled, the water was too deep, and they couldn’t get out. They were the initial rescue and that’s how this event unfolded to rescuing people from their houses.”
The flooding, O’Neill said, was caused by “just too much water for the creek.”
“It’s a small creek and it bottlenecks at Lovers Lane, which is also the lowest point,” he said. “It’s just too much water in too short of a time and it overflowed its banks into some of the homes”
O’Neill said the major concern in rescuing those in the area was the temperature.
“It’s cold. It’s the middle of winter,” he said. “Our biggest concern is getting people into the shelter where we can provide them warmth, food, and somewhere to lay down. We’ve been doing this since about 4 a.m., when we started the water rescues. We’re still at it. It’s slow-going.”
For the most part, O’Neill said, the evacuation has been on a voluntary basis, depending on the topography and amount of flooding.
“If they don’t want to go, we’re not forcing anyone to leave,” he said. “For the most part, people who have water in their homes are going. We don’t have any information how soon they can get back in their homes. Even though the water is receding, we’re still out there doing rescues in boats.”
To the best of his knowledge, O’Neill noted, there were no power outages and power lines had not been damaged. He also said he had not received any reports of sewage spills.
“When the water goes down, that’s when we can go back in and do some assessments to see what the real damage is to individual homes and the infrastructure,” he said.
O’Neill also said he had not heard of any injuries.
“There haven’t been any injuries because of the flood, but we do have a couple of individuals with pre-existing conditions, so we are monitoring them closely,” he said. “We have EMS standing by at the evacuation shelter.”
For more information, contact the Office of Emergency Services at 831-636-4168.
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