National City flood victims blame city engineering for destroying their homes

A group of National City homeowners flooded out of their homes are blaming the city for the problem.

They claim it's all because of poor city engineering that not only damaged their homes, but almost cost some their lives.

Rosie Delgado and her family hopped in the back of a pickup truck waiting to be rescued after their home flooded in the Jan. 22 storm.

“I thought I was going to die,” Delgado said. “To tell you the truth, I had to get out through a window because the doors got jammed with the pressure of the water being so high."

The saturated walls inside Delgado’s home and neighboring homes on East 8th Street are now torn down to the studs after their homes became pools.

According to a city storm report, 3.4 inches of rain dumped on the city in three hours.

But Delgado and her neighbors say that in their decades of living in the neighborhood, deluges never caused disasters like the Jan. 22 storm until the city installed the canal grate.

“I feel the city is negligent as far as putting this up, this grate, which anybody with a spoonful of brains would know that when the storms come, that's going to become a dam," neighbor Hal Malinski said.

Sherry Gogue says she’s never seen a flood like what destroyed her home until the past two years, when her home and others flooded in January of 2023, because of the grate she says needs to be removed.

During a storm update at National City Council Tuesday night, the city's director of public works attributed part of the problem to debris from other cities flowing downstream, clogging their channel system.

“Our crews were out there four straight days, cleaning our entire channel system," Stephen Manganiello said.

Ben Martinez, city manager, issued a statement to NBC 7 about homeowner's concerns, saying, in part: "We are still investigating what happened and have not made a decision on what steps, if any, to take related to our drainage infrastructure."

That's little consolation to Delgado and others who can no longer live in their own homes, as they're forced to fork over money out of their own pockets to fix flooding damage they say is the city's fault.

“The government should pay for it,” Delgado said when asked who should take care of repairs. “Because it’s their fault, they built that thing.”

Gogue agrees saying, “We didn’t just lose little things. We lost everything. Everything. Our cars, our trucks, our clothes, everything."

Delgado did receive a 10-day housing assistance voucher from the city.

During the storm report, city leaders say they’ve provided more than $160,000 so far in housing assistance to National City residents.

Martinez says “they're still waiting for a response from federal and state government resources related to further financial assistance.“