The Pajaro River on the border of Monterey and Santa Cruz counties breached a levee early Saturday, flooding the Pajaro River Valley.
Across the Central Coast’s Monterey County, more than 8,500 people were under evacuation orders and warnings, including roughly 1,700 residents — many of them Latino farmworkers — from the unincorporated community of Pajaro.
“This community is a small, disadvantaged community, mostly Latino, mostly low income farmworkers,” said Monterey County Board of Supervisors Chair Luis Alejo. He added that this same flooding happened in 1985. “It's heartbreaking to see the community under flood waters today. And we know that these residents are going to go through some challenging times over the next several months to try to get their homes repaired and make them habitable again.”
He also said emergency staff is predicting another major atmospheric storm on Tuesday, meaning that the evacuation and the the flooding of Pajaro River is likely to continue for several days.
"A county spokesperson told me the entire town is under some level of water, but we can't say exactly how much," said Linden in an interview with KQED.
Linden said he also spoke with residents on the Watsonville side of the river which hasn’t flooded. Many residents there had evacuated their homes in the middle of the night, and many had slept in their cars.
Torres said the levee system had “never been built to capacity.”
“It was built back in the '40s, and I think the bigger problem is just that there's been a lack of focus on maintenance to better it,” he said. “Some [projects] were supposed to be coming down the pipeline soon, but not soon enough.”
