Raymond Leon delayed his wife’s wake by a month because of damages to the Apostolic Church in Guadalupe during the January 2023 storms.
“We couldn’t hold a church service. Some struggled to come back. It was very hard for everybody,” Leon said.
Heavy rains in January caused the Santa Maria River to veer off its natural course and onto Pioneer Street—flooding homes and the church with water and debris.
“It looked terrible,” Leon told the Sun. “In the church, we had to almost remodel the whole thing on-site. We had to take out everything that was in there. We had to put in a new platform and we had to scrape the flooring, put a new floor in there. It was a lot of work.”
It cost about $6,000 to replace curtains and pews inside the building, $11,000 to replace the carpet, and the church is still paying $17,000 to the company that helped remove mud from the building, he said. The church built a block wall around the building’s perimeter to help protect it from future water damage, costing about $20,000.
Leon said the Apostolic Church didn’t qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) relief, so everything was covered by local donations, and volunteers helped the church in its months-long road to recovery.
“Thank God we’re back in action; the back [house] we’re working on slowly and there’s no rush because no one’s living back there, but with God’s help we’re going to get it done. We’ve done it before,” Leon said.
This is not The Apostolic Church’s nor Pioneer Street’s first time flooding during severe storms. Guadalupe Mayor Ariston Julian estimated that the river flooded the community four times in the last 30 years.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Julian told the Sun. “There used to be some sort of channel but with the sediment and the sand and willows, it’s become flat, and that’s why it meandered south toward Guadalupe, Pioneer Street, and the wastewater treatment plant.”
This time around was worse, Julian said, with homes yellow-tagged because of the damages—forcing families to move into H-2A farmworker housing or find another place to live.
After months-long efforts to get federal and state funding that never prevailed, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted to approve an $8 million project to temporarily protect Guadalupe from flooding this winter season. While the project came in under budget and was finished before a Nov. 1 deadline, as of Nov. 22 county officials were still searching for a solution that will protect Guadalupe over the long run.
“They spent a lot of money for a temporary repair but hopefully in the future they can make it better,” Leon said. “We can’t hold whatever storms back, we just don’t know what can happen … we just pray that no chaos happens.”
The Santa Maria River levee stops at Highway 1. Beyond that, the only structure to keep the river from flowing into the community below is a dirt berm that a private landowner built, said Cory Bantilan, 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino’s chief of staff.
During the January storms, the river was flowing at 25 cubic feet per second—more than 11,000 gallons per minute—sweeping through the dirt berm and allowing the river to flow into the city, Bantilan said. Along with damaging homes and the church, the river flooded farmland, destroyed the access road to the Rancho Guadalupe Dunes State Park, damaged the wastewater treatment plant, and caused effluent to release into the river and the ocean.
“There were a lot of damages to the city. Obviously the city doesn’t have millions of dollars to fix these things. They’re working on their side for the treatment plant, but immediately our staff tried to put together a plan and say we need to protect some of these things from future events,” Bantilan said. “We started pushing the feds and the state agencies, the California Office of Emergency Services, also FEMA on the federal side and the Army Corps on the federal side.”
A levee extension proposal was rejected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—the federal regulatory agency for levee projects—because of the cost-benefit analysis, which looks at how much it will cost to build the project and the value of the property it’s protecting. In the end, there were too few homes to protect for a project of this size, he said.
The county applied for state and federal grants for a debris and sediment removal project in the river, but the agencies didn’t see the issue as an emergency, Bantilan added. After months of back-and-forth between the county and state agencies, Supervisor Lavagnino received a call from Assemblymember Gregg Hart (D-Santa Barbara), who said that this funding wasn’t going to happen, he said.
“The problem was still money, and at some point, we said we have to do this ourselves. The city can’t afford it, the state and feds aren’t going to do it, let’s ask our county for funding,” Bantilan said.
On Sept. 12, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted to allocate county general fund money and American Rescue Plan Act funds for a sediment and debris removal project.
Crews from local construction companies R.W. Scott Construction and Vince Lopez Jr. and Sons worked 12- or 24-hour days for six weeks to move the sediment, dig a deeper channel, reconstruct a 16-foot-high berm, and remove vegetation from the river’s path.
“It’s an unengineered berm; unlike the levee it’s just sand. They call it sugar sand because it washes away in the water like sugar,” Bantilan said. “It was engineered [to hold] only up to 5 cubic feet per second. … Obviously, if we have the same flows we had last year it’s going to fail. Eventually this will fail; it’s not a long-term solution, it was made to protect those three spots as long as possible.”
County officials have discussed pitching HESCO baskets—filled with sand, dirt, or gravel—to the state as an option “in between a berm and a levee” to better protect Guadalupe, he said.
“We don’t have a solution, but that’s part of our pitch: We spent all of this local money and now you can step up and help us do something more long-term,” Bantilan said.
Some Pioneer Street residents moved back into their homes two to three months after the floods while others found new housing, Mayor Julian said.
“Some of the folks lost everything; we still connect with the families,” Julian said. “When they hear rain, that is a concern to them because they don’t want to go through that and experience that flood again.”
As a result of the severe damages, the Guadalupe City Council approved a new emergency preparedness plan and a community response team to help coordinate the local emergency response before county, state, and federal agencies come into play, he said.
“County Public Works staff and engineers have done a super excellent job of providing potential barriers that could be put up and doing what they could to actually access money for the berm buildup,” Julian said. “Steve [Lavagnino] has really bent over backwards to work with the city of Guadalupe.”
Now expecting an El Niño year with wet weather patterns, Julian said he’s glad the county took action, but he’s still concerned about future flooding breaching the temporary solution.
“It’s very challenging. We really care about the individuals down below. We care about their life and safety and so does the community,” he said. “Every time there’s a drop of water coming down, all our eyes point to that weak spot in the river.”
Reach Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor at toconnor@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 10, 2023.
