Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Milee Yu (bottom) and Esther Yum, both 11th-graders at Lynbrook High School, were two of some 30 local students who filled sandbags at the Public Works lot.

Saratoga spared devastation of El Niño's temper tantrum

City Hall loses power, others clean up mud

By Sarah Lombardo

Although pummeled by last week's storms, Saratoga seems to have been spared the devastation experienced by neighboring cities and counties throughout the state. But El Niño's first real temper tantrum of the season didn't exactly go unnoticed.

As land disappeared beneath swelling creeks and winds whipped through the city Feb. 2 and 3, residents spent last week cleaning up mud and debris--and preparing for a second series of storms that hit the area Feb. 5 and continued through Feb. 7.

Gary Reed, district manager for 10 years of the Saratoga Cemetery District, where the city's rain gauge is kept, said the 24-hour rain total for Feb. 2-3 alone reached 5.47 inches. "That's possibly the heaviest I ever recorded here," he said.

To date this year, the city has received 27.73 inches of rain, compared with the city's normal rainfall of 17.98 inches for this time of year.

The Saratoga Creek flooded overnight Feb. 2. Saratoga Fire District Chief Ernie Kraule said his department got calls from some creekside residents who needed their basements pumped out due to flooding.

One resident, who lives on Baroni Court, said water got into his family's guest house, but that they were able to protect the main house. "We kept most of it out with sandbags," he said.

Coldwell Banker's real estate office on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road wasn't so lucky. The creek flooded the area, leaving a trail of mud that extended all the way from the creek to Highway 85, according to broker manager Bob Egan.

"It just made a disaster," he said.

About four inches of mud was left in the office's parking lot, main and rear entrance, kitchen and work area after the water subsided. Egan said employees on Tuesday continued with work as usual, but a meeting with the company's president, in town from San Ramon to congratulate the Saratoga office for its top sales status, had to be canceled.

Egan said it is not the first time the creek has threatened the office, but that in previous years' storms, the flooding has occurred during the day, when employees could watch the creek's level and call for sandbags before a flood. This time, however, the flood happened overnight.

The cleanup effort at the office continued through the night Feb. 3, and by the next morning, one employee said you'd never know it had been under inches of mud the day before.

City Hall didn't recover so quickly. After a short-lived power outage Feb. 2 caused officials to bring out the city's emergency generator, phone service at City Hall was cut from early Feb. 3 until the morning of Feb. 5. City officials were forced to set up the city's backup phones in the emergency operations center.

City Manager Larry Perlin said the outage was storm-related, but Pacific Bell crews, who had been on scene since the morning of Feb. 3, could not determine the exact cause of the service disruption.

The lack of phone service meant the city had no way to call volunteers to fill sandbags at the city's corporation yard. Administrative analyst Lori Burns said staffers recruited teens from the Warner Hutton House to fill bags for residents.

But Perlin said except for a number of downed trees, the city fared well. "There's not a lot of flooding, not a lot of drainage problems," he said. He cited Saratoga's location as one reason it escaped major flooding.

"We're fortunate to have a bunch of little creeks flow through town and then go off to other cities," he said. "Essentially, the problems get pushed further down the line."

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