After the town flooded and about half its homes were damaged, residents of this farming community struggle to find temporary housing and rebuild.
Once the levee broke, the water rose so quickly that in the few minutes it took Erica Lopez Bedolla to decide to evacuate and gather her children and a few necessities, it had surged from her ankles to her knees.
Most of the town was inundated. About half the homes were damaged and so was the elementary school. Many homes were destroyed. Most residents do not have savings to fall back upon, let alone flood insurance. Many residents are farmworkers in the U.S. illegally, making it more difficult to qualify for federal disaster funds.
Earlier this month, at a community meeting at Planada’s Cesar E. Chavez Middle School, residents took turns asking a version of this question over three angry hours, also blasting government officials for the failure to issue timely evacuation orders and the slow pace of relief efforts. “We are traumatized and scared,” another woman added. “What is the county going to do to take care of its rural communities?”
McCarthy hired landscape architect Wilbur David Cook, who also worked on Exposition Park in Los Angeles and Balboa Park in San Diego. In short order, Planada had a school, theater, hotel and library. Mike Hurtado removes flood-damaged cabinets at his home along Stanford Avenue in Planada, Calif. January storms caused major damage when floodwater reached 4 feet inside his house.
People watched in shock and horror as water flooded into their homes, and when they tried to flee in their cars, they were swamped and had to be rescued.The next morning, Alex Martinez, who grew up in Planada but now lives in Merced, rushed over in his truck to help with the evacuation. Hecamera over block after block of homes that appeared to be floating in a lake of brown water.
Villagomez runs the register and freely hands out pastries on credit, maintaining an idiosyncratic accounting of who owes what. If she doesn’t know a customer’s name, she pens descriptions in her ledger, such as “man with a scruffy beard,” which her children find both charming and hard to parse. But the Villagomez family and much of Planada had the same response to the disaster. They called in their relatives and everyone got to work. The county had dropped off dumpsters. Residents filled them with detritus.One afternoon a week after the storm, three generations crowded into El Gallito and its connected kitchen.
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