More than 700 people have joined a lawsuit against the City of San Diego, claiming it failed to maintain Chollas Creek ahead of the historic January rainfall, which they allege made the flooding far more devastating.
“This is the story of the City of San Diego neglecting its maintenance obligations in the Chollas Creek channel and flooding thousands of south San Diegans—destroying their lives, homes, and businesses,” the suit reads.
The suit alleges before the rain of Jan. 22, the city knew Chollas Creek posed a flooding risk and must be maintained.
“Yet the City deliberately ignored these facts,” the suit reads. “Rather than perform preventative maintenance on the Channel to clear vegetation, sediment, and trash, the City only performed maintenance after the Channel overflowed. Rather than invest taxpayer dollars in infrastructure improvements and maintenance plans, the City moved funds dedicated to its stormwater infrastructure to less urgent projects.”
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The city does not comment on pending litigation. This latest lawsuit is one of several filed against the city in the wake of the floods, which attorneys anticipate will be combined into one complaint.
The lawsuit includes more than 700 plaintiffs, including two families who lost loved ones in the floods – bringing wrongful death claims – and several who have yet to be return home, still rebuilding nearly eight months later.
“The city failed to take routine, practical maintenance plans and actually keep these channels clean in a way that would protect the folks of south San Diego,” said attorney Domenic Martini, who filed the suit.
“When the city failed to maintain Chollas Creek, it over grew with vegetation, with dirt and with sediment and debris, and it backed up into the rest of the infrastructure that was connected to it,” Martini said. “And so ultimately, the city dammed the end of the channel, causing everything up in the higher elevation areas to build up and to overflow, to flood these folks.”
One of the plaintiffs is Alliance San Diego, a nonprofit community organization whose new Barrio Logan office was damaged by the floods.
“It was devastating. We just bought this building,” Andrea Guerrero, Alliance San Diego executive director, said. “We have to work hard to raise every dollar that we receive.”
Guerrero said the organization had to halt its programming and services, was displaced for three months and has spent more than $100,000 on repairs.
“The floods were not a natural disaster. They were a planning disaster,” Guerrero said. “Let me be clear. We all knew that the heavy rains were coming, and whether it was that day or it was going to be another day, the system was going to fail. That's what the city knew, and that's what the city ignored.”
Guerrero and Martini said the lawsuit is about recovering damages – but also an effort to push the city to create a plan so flooding like what happened in January never happens again.
“The city does not have a routine maintenance plan for these channels, particularly Chollas Creek,” Martini said. “What happens is the city comes in whenever there's flooding, and they clear the channels, and they clear the vegetation, but they don't have any plan for in between those flooding events.”
The more than 700 plaintiffs in this suit are seeking damages upwards of $200 million, Martini said.
A status hearing on the suit is scheduled for Oct. 11.
