Tire tracks in the mud on Pecho Valley Road in Los Osos headed left onto Montana Way, where a roll-away container brimmed with ruined furniture, rugs, and other household items.

On the next street up—Vista Court—residents and volunteers from the community used shovels and wheelbarrows to move mud out of houses and backyards into a cul-de-sac still grappling with the impacts of a mudslide that hit the neighborhood on Jan. 9 around 5 p.m.

“I was looking through the kitchen window and watching the tidal wave come down the street,” one resident said. “I thought, that didn’t look right.”

A Los Osos Community Services District-owned levee that shores up a basin holding stormwater from the Cabrillo Estates neighborhood was working as it should have on Jan. 9, according to General Manager Ron Munds. However, “at some point in the afternoon, a breach occurred, and it unleashed a wall of sand and water,” he said.

That wall nailed Vista Court, which took the brunt of the damage, and continued down through Montana Way, onto Pecho Valley Road, and headed toward the bay. About 15 homes on Vista and five on Montana sustained damage, Munds said.

“Everyone was home, it came through here, and no one got injured,” Munds said. “Which is a miracle.”

Alice Stone was in her garage “when the flood happened, and I walked through it to the house,” she said. She’s lived there for 14 years with her son who has multiple sclerosis.

“I’m 81, and I’ve never seen anything like this happen,” Stone said. “It’s just another day, I guess.”

In the mid-afternoon on Jan. 10, volunteers rolled up wet rugs in her garage, carrying them down the street to dump into a roll-away container, while Stone tried to wrap her head around what to do next.

She’d attempted to apply for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) earlier in the day, to no avail. Although President Joe Biden included San Luis Obispo County in his federal disaster declaration on Jan. 9, it didn’t qualify area residents for individual assistance just yet.

FEMA Region 9 spokesperson Robert Barker said the declaration triggered a “sub-category of assistance.” If the state needs additional resources to deal with the damage caused by the storm and the ongoing emergency, FEMA can provide it.

Moving forward, local governments need to start assessing the destruction, which is why SLO County is asking all its residents to report their property damage through recoverslo.org, said county Office of Emergency Services spokesperson Rachel Dion.

“It doesn’t mean that people will magically get money. We still have to go through the process to apply for damage, and we can only do that if people report this information to us,” Dion said. “It could be something as minimal as ‘my fence fell down.’ Or we saw people who had patio furniture damage. … Even that little stuff adds up.”

Local governments aggregate all of that information and submit it to the state Office of Emergency Services. If the state determines that the damages exceed its capacity to provide help, the governor can send a request to FEMA through the president, who would have to approve the agency to provide individual assistance to natural disaster victims.

Elected representatives, like Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-San Luis Obispo) and Congressman Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara), said they’re pushing for more state and federal resources.

“The tragic loss of life, the power and internet outages, and the extensive damage to homes and businesses have made it clear that robust federal and state intervention is vitally needed,” Addis said in a statement. “It’s heartening to see how our communities and first responders have come together in this moment of crisis, but we all know there is so much more to do to repair what’s been lost—and that will be our focus going forward.”

Phyllis Schoonbeck walked down her Vista Court driveway on Jan. 10, muddy toes peeking out from her sandals. A recently arrived volunteer introduced himself to her and asked what he could do.

Los Osos resident and volunteer Quinn Brady stepped in to help: “Do you want your carpet to be taken out?” she asked.

“Heavens yes. There’s no coming back from that,” Schoonbeck responded.

Schoonbeck’s home bore the brunt of the slide, with mud, sand, and water filling the inside of her house. She had been across the street at her friend’s house when the slide came through and said she was lucky to be alive.

“I don’t think I would have made it,” Schoonbeck said. “It was coming way too fast.”

Her home was one of two red-tagged by the county, deemed unsafe due to structural damage. She reached out to her insurance company for help, but didn’t get very far.

“The insurance [companies] are shutting the door. It was a flood, you know, and you don’t have flood insurance—too bad, so sad, good bye,” she said. “There’s not too much anyone can do.”

Many of the homes in SLO County that sustained damage due to flooding and/or mudslides on Jan. 9 and 10 won’t likely be covered by home insurance as flooding isn’t included in standard home insurance policies. It’s extra. This includes homes and businesses impacted by flooding from Laguna Lake in SLO, San Luis Obispo Creek in SLO and Avila Beach, Morro Creek in Morro Bay, the Salinas River in Paso Robles, the Arroyo Grande Creek levee failure in Grover Beach and Oceano, and so many other places across the county.

Lisa Babb, who owns Central Coast Carts in Morro Bay with her husband, said they hadn’t tried to reach out to their insurance company yet. On Jan. 11, they were still focused on cleaning up the damages they sustained when Morro Creek came charging through their shop at 1598 Main St.

They watched the creek rise on Jan. 9, using bags of pellets as sandbags to prevent water from coming through their front door, but Babb said the creek just pushed through the back door and starting flowing out the front like a river. Friends came and tried to help them move laptops, computers, golf carts, and electric scooters to higher ground.

“You’re kind of wading through it, trying to almost swim through it. We had to turn the power off. … Until we just realized we were walking through water with lithium batteries, which is not good,” Babb said. “We pretty much just swam outside the store to our trucks. There were refrigerators flowing by.”

The next day, 10 to 12 people showed up with shovels to help them get the mud out of the shop and salvage what they could: “There’s nothing in our shop that hasn’t been touched,” she said.

As she looks to a weekend with more rain in the forecast, she said they’re just trying to get everything valuable to a safe space, adding that they don’t even know where to start when it comes to trying to recoup from the disaster.

“It’s sad. I’m looking around at all our neighbors right now. And everyone’s in clean-up mode. It’s disaster street. And people have lost lives,” she said, adding that if you look at things from that perspective, she’s one of the lucky ones. ∆

OTHER LOCAL STORM COVERAGE

Community bands together amid evacuations

County scrambles to provide shelter while tragedies hit

Devastation: Residents are grappling with the aftermath of the deluge that battered SLO County Jan. 9 and 10

Levee systems, dozens of roads and bridges damaged