Jessica Calix and her 8-year-old son used to live in a fourplex just yards from the Chollas drainage channel in Southcrest.
“We used to walk through there and we walk around the neighborhood and we go to the playgrounds and the parks. I mean, we really enjoyed it. It was beautiful,” she said.
There’s a nature trail next to the channel, and the area was so overgrown that she thought it was all something akin to a nature preserve.
“Animals would come from there, like frogs, and (there were) always beautiful butterflies. Always tons of nature," Calix said.
Those lovely memories were shattered on Jan. 22, when the skies opened up. Calix was volunteering at her son’s school in Point Loma. The heavy rain concerned her, so she called a neighbor who FaceTimed with her, revealing waist-high water in their apartment.
A month later, the devastation of that day is still raw.
“I would say that most of the people that were in their homes when it happened, they can’t even talk about it because it’s so painful," Calix said.
Now, she and her son are living in a hotel, paid for by the county. But they can only stay there until early March.
Jan. 22 was also a stunning day for Natalie Gill, who found flood waters pouring out of the front door of Native Poppy, the floral gift shop and warehouse she owns in Mission Valley.
“I was in absolute shock," Gill said. "It’s a glass front door and I saw that the water was here and all of our gift products were floating like a fish tank."
Though it's been a month, Gill still has a hard time coming to terms with what happened. Flood water made its way up the banks of a creek near her business. The water flowed over a cinder block wall, across a portion of the parking lot and into the floral shop — where it had the power to lift up a large flower cooler and move it several feet.
In the weeks since, Gill and her team have been able to clean up the warehouse and get back in business. But it has not been easy. Two delivery vans parked inside were destroyed.
Still, she does see a silver lining. Once her customers found out what happened, they started placing pre-orders, getting Gill the cash she needed to get back to something approaching normal.
“Our community has been supporting us through this. We haven’t had a ton of help from other government organizations or insurance," she said.
Gill said her insurance only covered the loss of her delivery vans, and while she was told she could apply for a low-interest Small Business Administration loan, she said she does not want to take on any more debt right now.
For Jessica Calix, life is still turbulent, uncertain. She’s not sure where she and her young son will go after they leave their temporary hotel, but she’s optimistic the federal disaster declaration for flood-impacted parts of San Diego will help.
And like Gill, she has a found a silver lining.
“I do feel optimistic for the future because all of us neighbors have become super close. We have these WhatsApp group chats, Facebook chats, even like Spring Valley, Southeast, this neighborhood and all of them have like 100 people because so many people were affected. So, we’re all helping each other out," Calix said.
Despite that, Calix said she does not plan to return to her home in Southcrest.
