Eight years ago this week, after a series of drenching atmospheric river storms, Coyote Creek, the longest creek in Santa Clara County, flooded badly, forcing the emergency evacuation of 14,000 people in neighborhoods around downtown San Jose and $100 million in damage in a torrent of muddy water.
On Thursday, the Santa Clara Valley Water District finished a project aimed at reducing the chances of serious flooding in the area in the future.
The $117 million project from the district, a government agency based in San Jose, constructed flood walls and other features along 8,500 feet of Coyote Creek in a 4-mile stretch of the waterway between Interstate 280 and Old Oakland Road in some of the areas that suffered the worst.
“This neighborhood was flooded,” said Shiloh Ballard, a water district board member, at a ceremony to mark the occasion near William Street Park. “There was water in people’s homes. It was up to people’s knees. The entire community rallied afterward to clean up. There were dumpsters, and everybody was carting trash. Trash and mud were everywhere. It’s not 100% risk free now, but we are minimizing the risk of it happening again.”
The flood, on Feb. 21, 2017, was the worst flood on Coyote Creek since 1997. City officials and water district leaders blamed each other afterward, with city leaders saying the water district didn’t provide clear enough warning of the impending flood beforehand, and water district leaders saying the National Weather Service warnings were clear days earlier but the city was too slow to order evacuations.
Particularly hard hit were the neighborhoods of Rock Springs, Naglee Park and several mobile home parks between Old Oakland Road and Coyote Creek.
Drenching weather that month also caused the near-failure of Oroville Dam, the nation’s highest, in Butte County.
Two years after the San Jose flood, the water district paid claims of up to $5,000 for 162 people who agreed to drop any future lawsuits. Many of those claims, which amounted to $666,707, went to low-income residents, a sizable number of whom were Vietnamese-American immigrants who did not have insurance.
In 2022, the water district agreed to pay $8.25 million to 231 remaining plaintiffs to settle lawsuits. The city paid $750,000.
Since the flood, the water district was ordered by federal regulators to drain Anderson Reservoir, the largest in the county, which sits near the headwaters of Coyote Creek, and rebuild its 240-foot-high earthen dam. That structure, built in 1950, was found to be at risk of failure in a major earthquake. The project, now under construction, has increased in price to $2.3 billion, and won’t be finished until at least 2033.
Thursday’s milestone was the first of two phases to upgrade flood protection on Coyote Creek. The second phase, with a price tag of $221 million, is set to break ground in 2026 and be finished in 2028, water district officials said. That project will construct 17,000 feet of protections, mostly concrete flood walls, along roughly 8 miles of Coyote Creek from Tully Road in the south to Montague Expressway in the north.
Because of concerns by neighbors over the flood walls in some areas, which are 10 feet high and extend 25 feet underground, the district is also installing structures called passive barriers in some places. Those are are devices that remain hidden at ground level, then are activated by water pressure during a flood, and lift automatically to a 90° angle, like a drawbridge, providing a temporary wall of up to 8 feet high to protect homes and other property.
The two phases of the Coyote Creek project will offer 20-year flood protection. That means they will protect against a flood so large it has a 1-in-20 chance of occurring in any year. But the highest standard for most flood projects is 100-year protection.
The Guadalupe River in downtown San Jose, and sections of Coyote Creek around Alviso, which flooded disastrously in 1983, have that level of protection. It allows residents to escape requirements from lenders that they must pay for flood insurance.
But to provide it to the rest of Coyote Creek from the roughly 8 miles from Montague Expressway to Tully Road would cost more than $1 billion, the water district concluded, and the agency said in meetings with neighbors that likely won’t be feasible for years without large amounts of money from the federal government.
“On the day of the flood, the water was coming in from that direction and that direction,” said Jeffrey Hare, a resident of the Naglee Park neighborhood, pointing Thursday. “It flooded 16th Street and all the homes around here in their lower levels. William Street Park disappeared under the water.”
Hare looked at the new flood walls, and 9,000-pound steel flood door built across from William Street Park near Coyote Creek to protect homes.
“Let’s hope they got it right,” said Hare, a San Jose State University environmental studies lecturer who sued the water district after the flood. “It has been a major inconvenience and disrupted the fabric of the neighborhood.”
Another local resident agreed.
“Hopefully this project will be a success and in the future it will help bring down flood risk and keep the neighborhood safe, so there isn’t a repeat of 2017,” said Amanda Erickson. “It was very sad. Everything was gone in a moment. Cars and homes were flooded. People pay the taxes. We want to see results.”