Salinas braces for rain, then runoff

UPDATE 1/6/2017 6 PM:

The Salinas Fire Department crews is gearing up for a wet weekend storm headed towards the Central Coast. The department plans to add additional staff starting Saturday morning until Monday. Crews have also been surveying areas that have historically flooded in the past. These include low-lying areas like Kern Street, the Russell Road area and along reclamation ditches.

A reclamation ditch that runs along Griffin Street in Salinas is one that concerns fire crews.

“The waterway travels under several roadways and under the freeway,” Salinas Fire Battalion Chief Matt Evarts said. “There’s lots of chokepoints along the way and those choke points can become a problem with debris.”

Debris like shopping carts and logs could get lodged under a bridge dam the water flow. Concerns of flooding are twofold.

“We deal in situations where all that rain will come through town very quickly,” Evarts said. “So sometimes we’ll have the flooding and high water events after the rain has gone by and we’re now getting what’s left of all the runoff from the mountains.”

The Bolsa Knolls area, north of Salinas, is no stranger to flooding. KION first met Julie Posey in January 2016 when rainwater gushed dangerously close to her home. It’s a different story this time around.

“Since then, they (public works crews) have come and re-sandbagged,” Posey said. “They’ve made sure that the drain is still clear, and they’ve done that before this next storm has started.”

Posey is still concerned because she doesn’t know how much rain will fall. Some of her neighbors who live on higher ground said they weren’t.

Others loaded up on sandbags, just to be safe.

“Grabbing some sandbags for our school,” Michael Arango said. “They’re trying to prevent flood. Yeah, so I’m just putting up the sandbags to keep the water from going inside.”

Salinas fire officials want to remind folks:

-Stay off the roads. When drivers crash, fire crews have to divert resources to the scene.

-Don’t go out to watch the waters rise. People could get swept away. On Friday, water was flowing through a Salinas reclamation ditch at a mile per hour. In strong storms, it could go up to 8 or 9 miles per hour.

ORIGINAL POST:

There is water in the drainage ditch alongside Griffin Road in Salinas. City firefighters expect there’ll be a lot more this weekend and were working Friday to keep the waterways running freely.

Salinas fire officials told KION’s Mariana Hicks that they have two major concerns as a wet Pacific storm takes aim on the Central Coast. The first concern is rain water produced during the storm. Their second worry will come a few days later, when storm runoff from coastal hills finds its way into irrigation ditches.

Tonight, Mariana reports on the city’s storm preparations and shows us the areas that firefighters expect to be trouble spots.