With soils saturated and waterways still flushing out the rainwater from the March 10 storm on March 14, city of SLO Public Works Director Matt Horn said he had crews working around the clock, across the city, to try to avoid the kind of catastrophic flooding the city saw two months ago.
“That’s what we were fearful of from yesterday’s [back-to-back] event. We had 26 staff running around all day, eight staff all night, to mitigate issues,” Horn said on March 15. “We fared fairly well.”
As of New Times‘ press time, county and city officials generally agreed that SLO County dodged a bullet with the latest winter storm onslaught. While some property and road damage was reported across the region, the county experienced no fatalities or widespread infrastructural failures like on Jan. 9.
“We actually fared really well today,” County Office of Emergency Services Spokesperson Rachel Dion said on March 14. “We haven’t seen as much widespread flooding.”
On March 15, the county lifted evacuation orders for Oceano residents south of the Arroyo Grande Creek levee and evacuation warnings for vulnerable areas of Arroyo Grande, Paso Robles, Morro Bay, Grover Beach, and Cayucos.
But in at least one instance of a Jan. 9 repeat, about 100 Lake Nacimiento residents are again cut off from services after the same section of Chimney Rock Road that was damaged on Jan. 9 “completely collapsed” in the latest storm.
According to the county, the March 10 storm—which brought more than 10 inches of rain to the nearby hills—destabilized a 50-foot-by-100-foot area of soil holding up the temporarily repaired stretch of Chimney Rock. While the surrounding lake waters had helped stabilize the soil, a combination of Monterey County’s drawing down of the lake and the new storm’s raging waters caused it to crumble.
The road is expected to be closed for a month or two, and county officials said they’re in touch with the stranded south shore lake residents about how to help them get access to services.
“We’re putting a plan together on how we’ll assist folks,” Dion said.
The improved storm outcomes for SLO County this month are no accident, officials said. Since the Jan. 9 disaster, local communities and residents have been laser focused on preparing for future rains, as the winter season continues to deliver historic storm events.
“After Jan. 9, basically our primary objective is storm recovery and preparation,” SLO city’s Horn said. “One of the things we focused a huge amount of resources on was doing debris removal in San Luis Creek, from Prado Road to Los Osos Valley Road, and through the Prefumo Creek area. That work has paid off dividends.”
In Los Osos, local Community Services District (CSD) crews closely monitored water levels in a stormwater retention basin that was breached on Jan. 9 and sent a mudslide into dozens of homes.
CSD General Manager Ron Munds said he stayed at the basin site until 11 p.m. on March 14 as rains persisted to ensure that the district’s temporary flood control solution was working.
As a short-term fix, the CSD has closed off the damaged portion of the basin, which, in turn, reduces its overall retention capacity. Officials are then pumping excess basin water out and releasing it onto Pecho Valley Road to keep it from violently spilling out to the road.
“It shoots out like a water cannon onto Pecho, and that’s when it can be dangerous for traffic,” Munds said. “We try to get it pumped down, but it’s, can we keep up? Fortunately, the rain came in at a rate we were able to keep up with.”
Munds said that communities on the Central Coast are more aware than ever about the potential for storm destruction and have been preparing accordingly.
“We have adjusted,” he said. “It’s been such a quick learning curve from early January to now. We’re better at anticipating. We’re better at having backup plans. … Our contingency planning is way better, and county coordination is way better. We are, in a weird way, adapting.” Δ
This article appears in Spring Arts Annual 2023.