For those who live on Beta Street in the Southcrest neighborhood of San Diego, rain will always be something that reminds them of one of the worst days of their lives.
“I never thought six to seven feet of water,” Greg Montoya, who has lived in the area for 30 years, told NBC 7.
He explained that in 2018, the same street flooded, but it was not nearly as bad as what happened most recently.
“I figured it would happen again, [maybe] a foot, foot and a half, two feet,” he said.
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On Jan. 22, hundreds of homes in San Diego were damaged during historic flooding, including Montoya’s. He had to tear out his walls, throw away his furniture and trash one of his vehicles. But what is most difficult for him now is feeling like he is one of the only people trying to prevent it from happening again.
“It’s frustrating. It’s very frustrating,” Montoya said. “All I’m doing is trying to get stuff done, doing stuff the city should be doing.”
Montoya explained that in the two months since the devastating flooding, he has been filing constant Get it Done reports for the city to clean up dumped furniture, flooded-out cars and trash from either Chollas Creek or one of the few storm drains near Beta Street.
“It’s tough because the neglect continues,” he said. “The city continues to ignore me.”
Especially when it rains, Montoya said, he could use some help.
“[Saturday] when they said ‘flash flood’ I said, 'Oh my god.’ I told my son ‘I can’t go with you. I got to go check my house,'" Montoya said. “Thank god I did.”
Montoya arrived on Saturday to see the curve of Beta Street, close to Birch Street outside of Southcrest Trails Neighborhood Park, flooded. He put on rain boots and got a rake and started to remove trash and debris from the grate of a storm drain that flows into Chollas Creek.
“They don’t send anybody to clean these drains. They don’t send anybody to clean the trash,” Montoya said in a cellphone video shared with NBC 7 of the moment he was raking in nearly calf-high water.
He added that a car hit a nearby, exposed water pipe during the rainstorm that could have exacerbated the issue by adding more water to the equation, but that the storm drain has been a problem for years.
“I’m ready to collapse,” he said. “It’s no surprise because I’m exhausted. I have to work on my house, I have to file Get it Done reports, write emails.”
NBC 7 reached out to the city of San Diego for a response on the storm drain but did not hear back by the time this story was published.
