Flooding and fallen trees close Santa Cruz County roads Wednesday
APTOS, Calif. (KION) The storm returned overnight, and the wind and rain has led to more streets closed and power outages.
On Huntington Drive in Aptos, a large tree fell on top of power lines totaling a car and knocking out power in the neighborhood. Aptos Junior High School is a part of that outage that PG&E tells neighbors should be restored Wednesday night.
“You do wonder what PG&E was looking at last month when they’ve been inspecting things, because supposedly everything’s been looked at in the process,” Tom Kaysen who lives across the street from where the tree fell said.
In Spring Valley Road in La Selva Beach, the street is completely flooded from the accumulating rain over the last week. Wednesday morning, a Mercedes got stuck in the over flowing street. Public works spent the morning attempting to funnel out the standing water on the road.
“Depending on how much rain there is, it goes on maybe three to four times a year to five or 6. It depends on the rain and how intense it is, but it's been flooding now for three or four days,” Tom Healy said.
As the winter conditions continue, the county is still looking for federal funding to continue from 2016-17’s devastating storms.
“FEMA and the Federal Highway Administration has never denied regardless of administration any extension for any state that has requested such an extension,” District 2 county supervisor Zach Friend said.
Two years wasn’t enough for the county to repair the more than 100 damaged sites, and now the Trump administration's withholding the more then $30 million the county thought they were promised.
“We have dozens of projects that are shovel ready here in Santa Cruz county that we just need a waiver to complete the environmental so we can actually reconstruct them,” Friend said.
Friend said there’s plenty that needs to be fixed in the aging infrastructure long term, but right now they need to take care of the rest of the projects from three years ago.
“In the immediate sense we just need the federal government to promise what they said they were going to do,” Friend said.
