CLICK TO HEAR JACK HALL’S INTERVIEW WITH U.P. NATIVE IN SAN DIEGO
Tropical Storm Hilary brought life-threatening flooding to parts of Southern California Sunday night, including San Diego, where an Escanbaa native has lived for two decades.
Jessica Brandt-Vande Gryp, who lived through wildfires in the San Diego area back in 2007, says her neighborhood has been inundated with heavy rain.
“I had to go out for a short time to go to the grocery store, and while I was in the store, it did start to pour very hard,” Vande Gryp told RRN News late Sunday night. “It came down very hard, very fast. When I left the grocery store, the water was about between my ankles and my knees. It was flooding. It was very fast-running water. And on my way home, the local park near my house was flooded. The streets were flooded. I turned onto the main street to go to my home, and it was a complete lake.”
Hilary made landfall Sunday over the Northern Baja California peninsula in Mexico about an hour south of San Diego. And while most people concentrate on a storm’s maximum sustained winds, Vande Gryp said that wasn’t the issue: torrential rains were.
“It is mostly always dry here,” Vande Gryp said. “We don’t get rain here. And when we do, it is catastrophic because it washes away vehicles. You can’t drive if you’re hyrdoplaning or the water is literally up to the driver’s side window. We have mountainous areas, or very rocky areas, and driving east out of town, on Highway 8, just outside of town, they had a washout. Boulders the size of cars came off the mountain and so now there’s boulders on the freeway.”
And unlike the Upper Peninsula, Vande Gryup says there’s nowhere for the water to go.
“We don’t have drainage here,” she said. “We don’t have ditches here like in Michigan. The water doesn’t go anywhere, so all the streets, all the highways, become rivers.”
And what’s more, as the first tropical storm in generations was approaching, they had an earthquake that measured 5.1 on the Richter Scale. It was centered near the town of Ojai in Ventura County, about 200 miles north of San Diego. But Vande Gryup felt it.
“I was in my garage doing laundry, and I felt something, and I thought, that’s odd, that can’t be an earthquake, not now!” she said. “We’re in the middle of this tropical storm, and then, of all things, yes, we have an earthquake.”
And there’s one more problem. Bugs. Spiders. Lots of them.
“Right now in San Diego, we are in the season where a lot of insects are having their migration or mating season,” Vande Gryup said. “Right now, it’s tarantulas and termites. Many of my neighbors have been posting videos and pictures of humongous clouds of termites that are coming out, trying to escape the rain.”
But overall, just as she told us 16 years ago when wildfires burned 800,000 acres of land in the San Diego area and killed 14 people, Vande Gyrup says that she and her family are safe. And she sent a shout-out back here to the Upper Peninsula.
“Hi to all my friends and family in the U.P.,” she said. “I miss you. I love you. I’m safe, so no worries. I’m just in my house. We’re watching TV, and we just had dinner!”
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