Monica Hill kept sandbags at her front door and on her back patio through the summer, through the dry months when San Diego barely sees a cloud and the heat settles over the inland neighborhoods for weeks at a time. She left them where they were.
Hill had lived at Village Green Apartments in San Diego's Rolando neighborhood for fifteen years when floodwater, four to five feet deep, tore through the complex in January 2024. More than 200 people from 57 units were displaced. They were households the government classifies as low-income, very-low-income, and extremely-low-income, according to a letter the property owner sent to the transit authority asking for bus passes, because so many residents had lost their cars in the water. Hill told Voice of San Diego she lost her living-room furniture, two beds, and photographs. She couldn't sleep. Wakeland Housing, which owns the property, put displaced tenants up in hotels while repairs went on. No public reporting says which hotel, how long Hill stayed, or how many moves followed.
By June 2024, local news described her as "moving in and moving forward" after five months, without saying whether she'd gone back to her old unit, moved to a different one in the complex, or left altogether. As of this October, Hill lives in a home with sandbags at the doors. Winter is coming. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's seasonal outlook says Southern California will likely see a wetter-than-average rainy season.
A standard sandbag weighs forty to fifty pounds when it's filled. Burlap and polypropylene both break down in steady sun: the UV wears through the weave, the sand settles and packs down, weeds find the seams. Keeping a line of them through a San Diego summer, in an inland neighborhood like Rolando where temperatures regularly reach the nineties, means either replacing the bags as they fall apart or living with a barrier that gets a little weaker every week it sits by the door, reminding you why you put it there.
Hill kept hers out anyway.
Kayla Tinker was also displaced by the 2024 floods. She told KGTV that every lower-floor apartment in her complex flooded, some with water she estimated at up to twenty feet. One of her sisters was trapped inside with her children. A neighbor broke a window to get them out.
Rain, Tinker told the station, is "kind of traumatic." When it comes, the fear comes with it.
The coverage that kept her words didn't keep the details that would tie her to a drainage channel, a city repair project, a landlord's obligations. We don't know the name of her complex or her neighborhood, or whether she went back or moved on. Her voice made it into the record. Her address didn't.
Most of the people displaced that winter are in Tinker's position. Village Green alone pushed out more than 200 people, and the city's stormwater department took more than 500 service calls in the two days after the January 2024 storm. Of the hundreds who lost housing, furniture, cars, and sleep, only a handful became the subject of follow-up reporting. Everyone else, the people whose complexes weren't named, whose channels had no maintenance request on file, whose displacement left no paper trail, is where Tinker is. They know what happened to them. They don't know whether anything has changed in the drainage systems serving their streets. And no public record tracks whether they're still in the same apartment, the same neighborhood, or the same city.
Eleven miles of channel work
On October 2, Mayor Todd Gloria declared a local emergency ahead of what forecasters expect to be a wetter, El Niño-driven winter. The City Council confirmed the declaration four days later, 6–0. The declaration lets the city hire workers and buy supplies faster, and it positions San Diego to ask for state and federal help. It arrived with a list of preparations: storm channel cleaning, sandbag distribution, a review of evacuation routes, pump station servicing, berms along the shoreline.
The figure the city has put out front: it cleaned and repaired more than 11 miles of storm channels over the past fiscal year, prioritizing areas that flooded in 2024. Between July 2025 and May 2026, it inspected nearly 33,000 storm-drain inlets, completed about 1,600 cleanups across several watersheds, replaced a mile and a half of pipe, and did preventive maintenance on all 15 pump stations.
That's a lot of work, and it matters. It's also counted citywide, while the question a renter in Rolando has is about the channel next to her building.
When the city says a channel was "maintained," it means crews pulled out sediment, vegetation, and debris, or repaired damaged sections. It doesn't mean the channel was widened or redesigned to carry more water than it was originally built for. And most of San Diego's channels were built for far less than a serious storm. In August, the city's stormwater director told KPBS that only 17 percent of the city's roughly 180 channel segments were designed for a 100-year storm, meaning an event with about a 1-in-100 chance of happening in any given year. Some channels were built for storms expected every two or five years. Those can overflow when about an inch of rain falls in a short stretch.
Only 17 percent of San Diego's roughly 180 storm channel segments were designed for a 100-year storm. Restoring the other 83 percent to their original designed capacity means they will do what they were always meant to do, which was never enough for the storms that cause the worst damage.
The city's 2026 budget documents report that 79 percent of channels can now carry the volume they were originally designed for, up from a 34 percent baseline. That's real progress by the city's own measure. But the measure is the original design, so a channel built for a two-year storm counts as fully restored once it can handle a two-year storm again.
A city auditor's report released in June 2025 found that San Diego carried out its emergency plans well during the January 2024 crisis itself, and that the longer recovery exposed serious gaps. The city had no plan for getting response and recovery information to the public quickly during and after the emergency. As of December 2025, a follow-up review found the Office of Emergency Services still working out how it would handle shelter operations, mass care, identifying gaps in services, and collecting data. The broader recommendation, that the city write its own recovery plan, was still listed as "In Process — Not Due."
The audit found other problems in the recovery. Planning was incomplete. The Infrastructure Incident Management Team, the group that coordinates repairs to roads, drains, and other public works during an emergency, had thin written procedures and no trained backups, which slowed its activation. Staff training and the tracking of lessons learned were both flagged as inadequate.
Meanwhile, the city's maintenance reports don't include a list tying the 11 miles to specific channels. A resident standing at her front door in Rolando has no city-provided way to find out whether the channel beside her building was part of that work, or whether the pump station serving her watershed passed its service check.
The channel next to Village Green
Village Green is a 94-unit affordable housing complex. Running alongside it is a concrete drainage channel called Cartagena-1, which carries rainwater from a pipe opening on Bonillo Drive toward College Avenue. Two channels upstream, Rolando-1 and Rolando-2, feed into it.
The flood risk at this address has a long paper trail. A 2012 city report on deferred capital needs described a collapsing corrugated-metal storm-drain pipe at 4150 Bonillo Drive, Village Green's address, that was leaking water and eroding the slope next to it. A storm-drain replacement project for Bonillo Drive shows up in city procurement forecasts around fiscal year 2017, though the available records don't confirm whether that pipe was part of the system that failed in 2024.
In 2017, someone filed a service complaint with the city that included photographs of water leaving Cartagena-1 and running into Village Green's parking lot and apartment areas. In September 2023, four months before the disaster, the property's managers asked the city to clean Cartagena-1. The city answered on January 5, 2024, seventeen days before floodwater destroyed dozens of homes, that the channel ranked 41st out of 174 on its priority list.
Hill moved into Village Green around 2009. She'd been there about three years when the drainage problem at her address landed on the city's deferred-capital list. In her eighth year, someone photographed water spilling from the channel into the complex. Six years after that, her property managers asked for a cleaning and the city put the channel 41st in line. A year later, the water was in her living room.
After the flood, the city cleaned Rolando-2, one of the upstream channels, hauling out 473 tons of sediment and vegetation. That channel is part of the same connected system, but city records don't say whether the work lowers the flood risk at Village Green specifically. The city's 2026 maintenance report lists Cartagena-1's last formal cleaning as 2019. Voice of San Diego saw workers clearing brush near Village Green shortly after the flood, but the maintenance report notes that it leaves minor work out of its records.
Nothing the city has published attributes any part of the 11 miles to Cartagena-1. The public record also lacks a hydraulic study giving the channel's design capacity or the rainfall intensity at which it spills over into Village Green. What the record does show is that Hill's former complex sits downstream of documented work and beside a channel with an older maintenance history. It doesn't show that the citywide program made her building any safer.
Set that fifteen-year history, from deferred-capital list to photographs to the 41st-place ranking to the flood, next to the 17 percent figure. If 83 percent of San Diego's channel segments were designed for storms smaller than a 100-year event, and the maintenance program brings channels back to their original design rather than upgrading them, then maintenance alone won't close the gap between what the drainage system can carry and what climate-intensified storms are bringing. For renters in affordable housing built beside undersized channels, that problem runs well past this winter.
What a renter controls
The city's own guide for renters says building maintenance and weather-damage prevention are the landlord's job. California law requires landlords to keep roofs, exterior walls, windows, and doors weatherproofed. But no state or city law requires a landlord in a flood-prone area to hand out sandbags, install a sump pump, or put in flood barriers. Whether repeated water intrusion violates habitability standards depends on the specific condition, whether the landlord was told about it, who controls that part of the property, and how fast it gets fixed. Those are case-by-case judgments, not automatic protections.
The city gives out empty sandbags at 11 recreation centers, up to 10 per household. Sand is on you; the city suggests a hardware or home-improvement store and prohibits taking it from the beach. You fill the bags yourself, each one ending up at that same 40 to 50 pounds. Ten of them laid end to end cover about ten feet of doorway. The closest pickup site to Rolando is the City Heights Recreation Center on Landis Street. The city's website doesn't list pickup hours, start dates, or how to get there by transit. Renters are eligible. But having sandbags doesn't give a renter any right to alter shared spaces, outdoor drainage, or other parts of the building the landlord controls.
The emergency declaration leaves all of this as it was. It does not pause evictions, require landlords to hand out sandbags, mandate flood-proofing for vulnerable buildings, or give renters any new say over building exteriors. What it changes is how City Hall buys things and coordinates. At the property line, the usual habitability and disclosure laws still decide what a landlord owes and what a tenant can do.
Whether Hill filled her sandbags herself, whether her property manager supplied them, whether anyone gave her permission to put them where they sit: none of that is in the public record. What's visible is that they're there, and that Hill, who watched water ruin her home, decided they should stay.
With Tinker, we can't even get that far. Without her address, her landlord, or her current living situation, there's no way to work out who is responsible for protecting her home, what drainage system serves her street, or whether any of the city's work reached her neighborhood. In that, she's like most of the people displaced in 2024. What happened to them is real and they remember it, but almost none of it is written down anywhere that would connect them to help.
What the forecast says
NOAA's October 15 winter outlook gives Southern California roughly a 50 to 60 percent chance of above-average total precipitation from December through February. "Above average" is measured against the winters of 1991 to 2020, split into thirds: the driest, the middle, and the wettest. NOAA is saying this winter's total rainfall is more likely than not to land in that wettest third.
That probability says nothing about when individual storms will arrive, how hard they'll hit, or which neighborhoods will get the worst of it. It describes the likely total for the season, not any single night's downpour. NOAA points people to shorter-range forecasts as winter gets closer, because the seasonal outlook tracks tendencies over months, not events over hours.
The city's emergency declaration cites El Niño. So does NOAA's forecast. Neither one is a flood prediction. There's a long way between "probably a wetter winter overall" and "your apartment will flood again," and Hill and Tinker are living somewhere in that stretch right now. The odds are real, but they don't tell anyone what to do on a particular night, so a careful person and a frightened person end up doing the same thing, which is keeping a sandbag by the door.
Each institution in this story publishes something useful. The city puts out maintenance totals, NOAA puts out seasonal odds, state law lays out what landlords owe, and the auditor tracks what the city still hasn't fixed. All of it is written at the scale of a whole city, a whole season, a legal code. None of it tells Hill what's happening in the channel outside when the rain starts.
It's been nearly three years since floodwater came into Hill's home, and the sandbags have been at her door for most of that time, at least since she moved back. They predate the emergency declaration, the 11 miles of channel work, the auditor's report, and this winter's forecast. They sat there through the months when the city was still figuring out how to communicate with affected residents, and they were there when the maintenance report listed Cartagena-1's last formal cleaning as 2019. Every official timeline meant to address the conditions that put them there has run longer than they have.
If Tinker has sandbags, no one has photographed them. What's on record is one sentence about rain being "kind of traumatic" and the story of her sister's children being pulled out through a broken window. Whatever she has done since to protect the place she lives now, no reporter has written down and no city record reflects.
The city has cleaned channels, serviced pumps, declared an emergency, and handed out empty bags. Whether any of that reached Hill's building or Tinker's street, the public record can't say.
Until it can, Hill's sandbags stay where they are.
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Only 17 percent designed: San Diego's stormwater director said only 17 percent of the city's roughly 180 channel segments can handle a 100-year storm, and KPBS reported in August that some segments overflow with as little as an inch of rain in a short period — a figure worth watching as the city sets its fiscal 2027 goal of maintaining more than 20 miles.
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Vermont's buyout wait: More than 90 Vermont households were approved for federal flood buyouts in September, but officials cautioned that appraisals, legal work, and closings could take months more — and VTDigger reported that families are still carrying mortgages and property taxes on homes they've been told will be demolished.
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Maui's rising rent: Displaced Maui wildfire survivors in FEMA temporary housing have been charged at least 50 percent of fair market rent since September 1, up from 25 percent, and Maui Recovers' fact sheet shows households must pay the assessed amount while waiting up to 90 days for an appeal decision.
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Standing homes, disputed safety: Several Los Angeles households displaced by the January 2025 fires still haven't returned to homes that survived, with families paying thousands for environmental testing while disputing insurer decisions — a situation CalMatters documented before California enacted new smoke-damage standards in September.
