A horde of volunteers manhandled 450 yards of sand and debris deposited in homes and backyards in Los Osos—that’s 40 to 50 dump trucks full.
Thank God for community members who care about their neighbors, because the residents of Vista Court in Los Osos would probably still be suffocating under a mountain of mud without them. After a mudslide inundated the homes in Vista de Oro on Jan. 9 and someone put out a call for help on the Support Los Osos Facebook page on Jan. 10, volunteers showed up en masse with shovels and wheelbarrows. Community members donated food, offered up temporary housing, and helped older residents fill out paperwork. A GoFundMe page has raised thousands of dollars to help with things like storage and moving expenses.
The local CalFire department had staff up there assisting daily—the Los Osos Community Services District did what it could to help with its limited resources.
What did SLO County do for the unincorporated community in dire need of assistance? Well, Planning and Building employees were there to red-tag and yellow-tag homes, obviously. The county government itself—not the elected officials, mind you—didn’t seem to do much until a meeting that took place four days after the slide.
Four days. One meeting. And that was that.
You know what Guadalupe, the small city that could, did after 20 of its families were displaced due to flooding caused by a Santa Maria River levee breach? Families were evacuated to the Guadalupe Auditorium where the Red Cross set up a trailer and distributed cots, blankets, and first aid items. The city then worked out a deal with a local farmworker housing owner to lease H-2A housing for displaced residents.
“We’re leasing these rooms for the residents because they have nowhere to go,” Mayor Ariston Julian told the Sun, New Times’ sister paper. “We talked about having emergency trailers placed along the street [that flooded] because people want to work on their houses.”
Holy hell! If that’s what a tiny city with an extremely limited budget can accomplish for its residents, surely SLO County can do amazing things! Nope. It can’t.
When folks asked the county for disaster help and assistance, they were directed to the Red Cross. The Red Cross did set up an evacuation center in Paso Robles and one in SLO on Jan. 9 for one night only. It’s also been handing out “cleanup kits” to impacted county residents since Jan. 14.
On Jan. 9, when the county last-minute evacuated people from Oceano due to what some residents said was a predictable Arroyo Grande Creek levee breach, I guess they were expected to drive through the storm all the way up to San Luis Obispo—with Highway 101 closed.
As far as those who are still unable to live in their now flood-ravaged homes, good luck! The Red Cross currently has zero shelters open in San Luis Obispo County—and according to a spokesperson for the Red Cross, it coordinates those shelters based on what the county asks it for.
San Benito, Monterey, and Santa Barbara counties still have Red Cross shelters operating. So what’s up, SLO County? What is up?
One Oceano resident who scrambled to the safety of the hotel she works at on Jan. 9, couldn’t return to her flood-damaged home for days. I’m sure she wasn’t the only one. Oceano residents showed up to a community meeting about the broken levee, upset, alarmed at the late evacuation notice, and concerned about the future. The three-hour meeting, which was livestreamed on the county’s Facebook page, is nowhere to be found.
When asked why, the county simply stated that Facebook livestreams aren’t recorded—even though a simple scroll through the county’s Facebook feed yields many past livestreamed events.
My favorite thing that happened was when none of the stranded residents at Lake Nacimineto showed up for the boat ride the county offered to rescue them. The county offered the ride, basically saying residents would be on their own after being dropped off at the Paso Robles Event Center and would need to find a place to stay for possibly two to three months. Enticing, yes?
It seems like the only thing that’s gone right in the wake of this historic natural disaster is something that state and federal elected officials advocated for (thanks, especially, to U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal). This county was included in the Biden administration’s major disaster declaration, meaning residents can apply for individual assistance with FEMA.
The county’s only saving grace is the quality of its first responders and Public Works Department employees, who kicked major ass during the storm and are still kicking ass. These are the folks who put their lives on hold to do the work that saved lives during the disaster. These are the folks who are putting our county infrastructure back together.
And they’re doing it even though some county residents deserve the situations they’ve found themselves in. Let’s take the dumbass with a new four-door white pickup who drove past road closure signs on Adelaida Road and dunked their front end directly into recently poured cement.
The cement had hardened by the time Public Works arrived to try and get the truck out. ∆
The Shredder is handing out “Stupid” awards. Send applications to shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 19-29, 2023.
Thank God you elected all of those Dems to the Board of Supes.
This county needs to get their sh** straight in 3, 2,1. The new board needs to put in some order. We saw the horrible response to the pandemic. What are we waiting for?