San Diego’s Chollas Creek overwhelmed by recent storm

Monday’s blast of rain was surprisingly fierce, but it was hardly uncommon for San Diego.

The rain flooded parts of the region and even carried away parked cars.

Conditions were dangerous in San Diego’s Southcrest neighborhood, where raging waters poured into Chollas Creek and flooded nearby homes.

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Greg Montoya was forced out of his home on Beta Street.

“The water came up all the way until about the 4-foot mark on the front door. The inside of the house is totally totaled,” Montoya said.

The brown water raged along the concrete canyon, flowing over its banks. Trees uprooted and fences were pulled down.

Montoya pointed to debris on the road and cars that were lifted from their parking spots.

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Some vehicles got tossed around and dragged into muddy floodwaters raging toward San Diego Bay.

Laila Aziz shared cell phone video of the torrent in southeast San Diego.

“You all, do not come down Akins,” Aziz said. “Oh, my goodness. Look at this car ... Do not come down Akins in Southeast.”

The deluge overwhelmed Chollas Creek where houses sit next to the concrete channel. The channel filled up and overflowed, trashing the neighborhood.

It is exactly the kind of thing Groundwork San Diego has been working to avoid.

The group works with city and community officials to create more natural spaces along Chollas Creek.

“Chollas Creek has many, many branches, and many of them do have concrete channels,” said Vicki Estrada, a land-use planner who is a member of Groundwork’s board of directors. “And what happens is the water hits — when the stormwater hits the street — it goes into the storm drain, into the concrete channel. It wants to go out as quickly as possible.”

The deluge came mostly on Monday morning with several inches of rain falling in the space of just a few hours.

While homes nestled against the creek suffered, the Southcrest recreation center did not. It sits in a wide green park next to the creek and the structure avoided the destructive flows that hit apartments on the other side of the rushing water.

“Look at the fence posts. I mean, for that to happen, there’s got to be an awful lot of force. I mean, cars were carried away,” Estrada said. “Again, because the water was going too fast. And if we have the room, make it wider, slow down the water. It’s not quite as impactful.”

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The National Weather Service said storms like this are not uncommon in the region, but the intensity of the rainfall got people’s attention.

San Diego has a long history of flooding, but El Niño and climate change played a role in Monday’s storm.

“All the climate change is really doing is making it a little more extreme,” said Alex Tardy, a National Weather Service meteorologist in San Diego. “Sometimes it’s dry. Sometimes it’s wet. Sometimes it’s warm and cold. But it’s exacerbating a condition that’s already in place.”

Even though the atmospheric river never actually came ashore, the storm pushed enough rainfall into the county to lift seasonal rainfall totals out of a deficit to just above normal for this time of year.

“Atmospheric rivers can be very beneficial because they bring up to about 50% of our precipitation. And we need that. We need water that fills our reservoirs. It’s good for the landscapes,” said Julie Kalansky, deputy director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “But when they last too long or are too intense in periods, they can be hazardous.”

Rain is moving out of the region for a little while. The next storm isn’t expected to arrive until early February.