NorCal woman’s home still in repairs after mudslide: ‘The most traumatic thing I’ve ever been through’
By Melanie Wingo
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COLFAX, California (KCRA) — There’s a night and day difference between how things looked at Carolyn Waite’s Colfax home on March 14 and how it looks now.
While the amount of cleanup that has been done at the Placer County house so far is noticeable, there is still a long way to go before everything is done.
“It’s just terrible,” Waite said. “It’s just the hardest thing to try to clean.”
The storms that led to the slide are long gone, but the memories of that day are as vivid as ever for Waite.
“It sounded like thunder and then it just sounded like a freight train or something ramming into the house,” Waite said. “I saw the door slam open and the windows were breaking. It was the most traumatic thing I’ve ever been through and just the craziest thing I’ve been through.
With help from friends and so many in the community, Waite and her family managed to dig out from all that mud and the downed trees and repair a home Placer County had deemed uninhabitable immediately after the slide.
The road to repairing the home was made all the more difficult since they didn’t have insurance specifically addressing mudslides. On top of that, the wait for all their utilities to get back online continues.
“If PG&E gets the power turned on, then we have to get the gas turned on,” Waite said. “We can’t turn the gas on until they turn the power on.”
The Waite family said that once the county gave them the go-ahead to have electricity turned back on at their home, they contacted PG&E.
That was April 12, and they’re still waiting for power to be restored.
KCRA 3 reached out to PG&E to see when the family may get their power back on or why there’s a delay, but we haven’t heard back yet.
In the meantime, Waite and her family are looking forward to the day they can return home, and they’re trying to remain hopeful that day will be soon.
“It’s OK,” she said. “We’re gonna make it.”
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