Homeowners on the hook for costly repairs from flooded Castro Valley creek
CASTRO VALLEY -- Public works department started major repairs on A Street in Castro Valley Wednesday where a huge slide along San Lorenzo Creek washed away part of the roadway during the New Years Eve storms.
Short term repairs will take about a month to complete with long term repairs estimated to take a few years at a cost of $6.5 million. Homeowners on the other side of the creek say answers about their properties are much harder to come by.
"We had some trees here so privacy was pretty cool," said Zaw Shein. He's lived along San Lorenzo Creek for the past two years with his wife and 4-year-old son. He lost half his backyard and a downstairs room during the storms on New Year's Eve. "The water came over from the creek probably about three to four feet," he said as he pointed toward what was left of his deck.
The water overflowed the creek and eroded the soil under his deck. The remainder of his yard was buried in mud, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage. His question now is who is going to pay for it.
"Right now things are not working in our favor at all," said Shein. He says his homeowners insurance company denied the majority of the claim because most of the damage was all outside the house itself. He also applied for FEMA grants, but says so far has only been approved for $222 dollars in aid.
"I was hoping FEMA would be covering what insurance doesn't cover, right?" said Shein. "So everything points to we're going to pay out of pocket right, so that's the big problem right now."
Shein says they don't have the money to pay out of pocket and would have to empty their son's college fund or try to get some kind of loan.
"It's unfortunate. I do feel for them," said Alameda County Public Works Director John Medlock Jr. "The force of the creek is pretty strong, you live on a creek and things happen."
According to county records, the land on the opposite side of the creek from the road is owned by each individual homeowner, meaning they would be responsible for any damage or erosion, not the county.
"They own to the center line of the creek. Right now our goal, our focus is to address this failure on this side," said Medlock. He says he wishes there was more he and his team could do, but the other side of the creek is private property.
Medlock says the work for the rest of this week will be clearing debris out of the creek, like the failed slabs of concrete walls and downed trees. The next step is bringing in heavy equipment to place rock and massive sandbags below the slide to stabilize the ground under the road. Medlock says the goal in the next month is to get at least one lane of A Street open heading northbound.
"This is a well-traveled road. It does cause some traffic jams during the commute hours and stuff," said Medlock. "That's what our goal is, to restore the road back to normalcy."
The construction work on the permanent fix won't start until sometime next year, partially because of the all the permits needed to do construction around a protected waterway.
FEMA is set to open two Disaster Recovery Centers (DRC) Friday for Alameda County residents impacted by the wave of storms that kicked off the new year.
Each DRC, formed in partnership with Alameda County and Cal OES, will provide information and referrals for local, state and federal storm relief resources. The services will be available to homeowners, renters and business owners who suffered property damage.
The centers will be open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day from Friday Feb. 10 to Friday Feb. 24. Translation services will be available.
The two DRC locations are:
- 7001 Oakport Street (off 66th Avenue)
Oakland, CA 94621 - Alameda County Public Works Agency
4825 Gleason Drive, Dublin, CA 94568
Officials are encouraging anyone impacted to file insurance claims before applying for FEMA assistance.
For more information on California storm recovery services visit www.fema.gov/disaster/4683.
