Flood clean up may take weeks
This is the first weekend of many, some home owners will spend cleaning up after Monday’s floods. For some of the harder hit areas, it may take weeks, even months to repair the damage caused by nearly 3 inches of rain that fell in just an hour.
Saturday we found one home owner in La Quinta who says just digging out will take weeks.
“I got a call Monday morning saying I hate to tell you this, but your house is flooded,” said Mike Dorn.
Dorn was on vacation when the hurricane fueled storm unleashed on the Coachella Valley Monday morning.
“Once the rain had stopped enough they could see that water was running out from under the garage door,” said Dorn.
His home in the La Quinta community Hidden Canyon, took on a lot of water and mud.
“The service door of the garage had been pushed off the cars had, the water in there was so high it was up to the door knobs, flooded the cars and that was just the garage side of the house,” said Dorn.
Inside water and mud reached as high as 8 inches.
“Pretty much every room of the house was soaked and mudded,” said Dorn.
Now the walls soaked by flood water are down to the studs and all of the carpet was thrown out in an effort to prevent mold.
“We don’t even know how long it’s going to take to get the inside prepared so we can even do the repairs. Right now they are just ripping stuff out to make sure there is no moisture in the walls,” said Dorn.
Outside, a wall of mud swallowed his swimming pool and much of the back yard.
“They can’t get back there with any equipment so it’s all been by shovel and wheel barrel and they loaded up one dump truck of mud from the back yard yesterday and filled it and took it away and they are working on their second one today between the backyard and the pool. There is that much mud back there,” said Dorn.
What was caused by a storm that moved through in a matter of minutes dorn says will now take months to repair.
“It’s a shock but you just got to put your head down and deal with it,” said Dorn. “It shouldn’t rain in the desert. We live in Seattle, that’s where it’s supposed to rain.”
Mike Dorn’s home wasn’t the only one hit, several homes in the Hidden Canyon community took on water. The community itself was also damaged.
A sink hole that opened up exposing several pipes, repair crews worry there could be more damage once inspected further. Cleaning the streets and dredging out lakes full of mud is all expected to cost over a million dollars just in this development and that doesn’t include the cost of repairing any homes.