The cleanup of flood damage from last week continued at a couple of the San Diego Community College campuses on Tuesday.
District officials are working overtime to have classrooms ready for the start of the spring semester this week.
The flood water flowed deep into the lowest level parking garage at the San Diego Continuing Education Cesar Chavez campus in Barrio Logan.
Pumps drained water on the first floor and below where the only two elevators in the building were both still full of rainwater.
“I was not expecting this at all, and to be honest, I don’t think anyone was," said Tina King, president of the community college’s continuing education campuses.
She led her team in the recovery effort that included industrial de-humidifiers and fans.
The heavily used multipurpose room is still covered in plastic with hopes the bamboo flooring can be saved. The safety of students and staff is the priority in restoration efforts.
“They know that we’re here to support them. This goes outside of supporting just their educational needs. We are also here to support them as the whole student," King said.
Cleanup at the district’s Educational Cultural Complex in Mountain View is also moving ahead. Water damage was especially heavy in the main lobby. Students are already able to access the campus.
“It was surprising but what surprised me the most is that the community here is trying to help each other clean up and deal with all that," said Josmar Vasquez, a first-year student.
Besides dealing with the damage on campuses, students and staff also have devastation in their homes and neighborhoods where infrastructure continues to be a problem across the county.
“We’re talking about the drainage being cleared out consistently so that the backup we’ve seen would not have happened," King said. So, there are lots of conversations with city officials and other individuals (that need to happen) about how this happened. How are we going to learn from this, so this does not happen again.”
