Holiday storm causes minor damage, flooding in South County
Morgan Hill – The sun will come out tomorrow.
And while the city was hit with its worst flooding in two years, the rain expected to fall through Tuesday shouldn’t do much more than get everyone just a little bit wetter.
“We held our ground,” Santa Clara Valley Water District spokesman Mike DiMarco said. ” If the forecast holds, we should be in good shape. The Llagas has plenty of capacity.”
Still, it was a busy weekend for public works crews around South County. The Uvas Reservoir began spilling Sunday night. DiMarco said that was due in part to the heavy rains that fell last year. At the start of this rainy season, he said, the reservoir was at 60 percent more full than normal.
“A lot of that was carry over from last year,” DiMarco said.”
Firefighters with the California Department of Forestry guided a man to safety across nearly 100 feet of gushing rainwaters after his car skidded 150 feet down an embankment into a creekbed four miles west of Dinosaur Point, according to CDF Captain Scott Mane.
“It had been raining all morning and most of the night,” he said. “It was pouring rain and there was 20 mile per hour wind. As we were setting up to do a rescue, water kept rising and we had a lot of debris coming at us. Initially the water was just below his waistline. By the time we made an emergency rescue, it was up to his chin. He was hanging on by a tree branch.”
Mane said the man, whom rescue workers pulled to shore after he strapped on a floatation vest, was “seriously injured.” He declined to disclose the man’s identity.
“This accident and several others that day were the result of high speed and rainy conditions,” Mane said. “It was a very complicated rescue. It was a stressful situation and we were pretty worried, but we got him. We’re pretty happy.”
Morgan Hill Police Sgt. Mark Brazeal said the department had approximately 15 calls for service related to the weather between 5am-9am Saturday morning.
“Everything from downed trees and debris in the road to flooded roads,” he said Monday.
In Morgan Hill, Watsonville Road was closed for about eight hours Saturday, as were westbound lanes on Dunne Avenue near Hill Road. The city’s public works team mobilized to pump water away from an apartment building on Bisceglia Avenue and removed downed trees and branches all over town. There were isolated pools of standing water downtown.
Officers were kept busy for about half an hour with traffic control after a tree fell across power lines near the Safeway grocery store at Joleen Way and East Dunne Avenue, Brazeal said.
“We were concerned about the Butterfield channel, which in some sections was overtopping,” City Manager Ed Tewes said. “There’s no outlet so when it overtops it floods through the surface streets, south down Railroad Avenue, but that turned out to not be a problem. There was a lot going on, but it could have been worse.”
In Gilroy, floodwaters swelled Uvas Creek this weekend and submerged the low-lying Silva’s Crossing at the entrance to Christmas Hill Park.
On Monday, cars stopped by the park entrance off Uvas Creek Drive to catch a glimpse of the muddy water streaming over more than a 20-foot span of the roadway. The road has been closed to traffic since New Year’s Eve.
Sean Maiwald, 11, and his parents live across the street and regularly visit during storms to check on the water levels. They stopped by several times this weekend.
“Yesterday it was a couple of feet higher,” Maiwald said Monday afternoon. “It was higher than I’ve ever seen it.”
It was much worse in the North Bay. According to the Associated Press, some 600 homes and 150 businesses were flooded in Napa County, causing an estimated $50 million in damages.
Saturday’s storm had dumped an average of 4 to 5 inches in Northern California, with parts of Napa County getting up to 9 inches in less than 24 hours, according to the National Weather Service.
Up to 3 inches of additional rain fell in parts of Sonoma County in Northern California on Sunday.
The California Army National Guard used all-terrain vehicles in Guerneville to pick up residents stranded in their homes by high water.
Strong winds and heavy rain threatened several levees across the state, including at least two in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where water splashed over the top of a levee at Collinsville, forcing 40 people from about 15 homes.
According to the National Weather Service Meteorologist Steve Anderson, the rain that’s pelted South County since Thursday night should abate early Wednesday morning, with the sun shining through the weekend.
“It looks like it will finally start to dry off,” Anderson said.
