Dozens are rescued in California from rising San Jose floodwaters

San Jose, Calif. — Rescuers chest-deep in water steered boats carrying dozens of people, some with babies and pets, Tuesday from a San Jose neighborhood inundated by water from an overflowing creek.

The rescued residents had to be taken to dry land and rinsed with soap and water to prevent them from being sickened by floodwaters that had traveled through engine fuel, garbage, debris and over sewer lines, San Jose Fire Capt. Mitch Matlow said.

Only residents who could show they had been cleaned off were allowed to board buses to a shelter for those displaced by the floodwaters.

“This is like once-in-a-lifetime,” said Bobby Lee, 15, of the water around him.

He was rescued with his brother and parents, who took clothes, electronics and some photos from their home in a neighborhood that ended up littered with submerged cars.

Earlier Tuesday, firefighters rescued five people stranded by flooding at a homeless camp along the same creek in San Jose.

Firefighters went door-todoor to tell residents to get out of their homes because the city does not have sirens or another emergency warning system, San Jose spokesman David Vossbrink said.

In the San Joaquin Valley in California’s agricultural heartland, farmers used their tractors and other heavy equipment to help shore up an endangered levee along the San Joaquin River.

The rains were the latest produced by a series of storms generated by so-called atmospheric rivers that dump massive quantities of Pacific Ocean water on California after carrying it aloft from as far away as Hawaii.

The rains have saturated the once-drought stricken region but have created chaos for residents hit hard by the storms.

The latest downpours swelled waterways to flood levels and left about half the state under flood, wind and snow advisories.

The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that a motorist in Northern California was swept into a creek last Saturday during another in the series of storms and drowned inside her car.

Witnesses had seen the woman driving around signs announcing that the road in the small city of Orland was closed, Undersheriff Todd James of the Glenn County Sheriff’s Office told the newspaper.

The current storm system began to weaken Tuesday after dumping more than a halfinch of rain in the San Joaquin Valley, over an inch in San Francisco, and more than 5 inches in the mountains above Big Sur over the previous 24 hours, the National Weather Service reported.

Dry weather was expected to return to the region today.

In San Jose, the fire department was called to Coyote Creek amid reports of as many as 40 people being stranded at the homeless encampment.

That number turned out to be inaccurate and everyone was located, fire Capt. Mitch Matlow said.

The conditions of the five people rescued were not immediately available.

The farmers, with tractors and other equipment, helped shore up the levee, arriving to fill a big breach within half an hour of noticing the break, said alfalfa farmer Tony Coit.

“The farmers ran it like a boss,” he said, using soil from the levee itself to fill in the 30-foot-wide break until they could truck in large rocks for more substantial repairs.

Near Monterey, the Carmel River and the Salinas River were also expected to approach flood levels.

In the Sierra Nevada mountain range, part of one of the main routes to Lake Tahoe was in danger of collapsing after a roadway shoulder gave way following heavy storms, leaving a gaping hole about 40 feet long and 17 feet wide, Caltrans engineer Jarrett Woodruff said.

Crews opened one lane open Tuesday as Caltrans workers tried to fix the road failure after numerous mudslides blocked it for days at a time in recent weeks.

Heavy storms over the last two weeks caused parts of the shoulder and part of one lane on the four-lane highway give way.