Valley still recovering from floods

It’s been almost a month since torrential rain soaked the Valley, flooding streets and trapping cars and the Valley is still recovering. We are learning some areas affected by flash flood will take weeks, even months of repair.

It was rain no one had ever seen before.

“It was pretty powerful,” said Randy Duncan, General Manager at SilverRock.

Over 2 inches fell in less than an hour in some areas. The August 25th storm turned streets into rivers.

“In the six years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anything like that,” said La Quinta resident Ron Dumpster.

When the waters receded, it took with it sand traps and much of the ground at La Quinta’s SliverRock golf course.

“With the amount of rain we had, I wasn’t surprised because rain does a lot of damage out here,” said Dumpster.

“A lot of our bunkers and native areas saw some erosion and a lot of them were washed out. Since then, we’ve repaired most all the bunkers and we are working on the native areas right now,” said Duncan.

Golfers were back on the greens within four days but the course is still accessing the damage and working with the insurance company to pay for the repairs.

“I’ve been in the Valley for 20 years and I have never seen rain like that in such a short amount of time. It was incredible and I know that we are not the only course to have some damage,” said Duncan.

Just down the road, high water closed two courses at the La Quinta Resort until further notice. The Mountain and Dunes courses, once a green jewel in the Valley, were left covered in mud.

“They still have a lot of repairs to make,” said Dumpster.

Duncan told us all of the courses in La Quinta were affected by the flash flooding.

Rancho Santana was one of the many La Quinta neighborhood hit hard by the storm. The flooding washed away much of the landscaping in the community. The builder told us it will be weeks until everything is finished.

In Palm Springs, we found a road still closed covered in water.

“We haven’t had any major floods since this year. We’ve had rain, but nothing that brought down so much soot,” said resident Betsy Carlson.

The road runs through the wash connecting the two sides of the Palm Springs Estates Mobile Home Park

“We now have about two three feet of silt where before it was just a riverbed,” said Carlson. “We can’t get across the road and luckily we have a back entrance, but there are 40 or so coaches up there.”

Carlson says because of the environmental concerns repairs to the wash may not happen until early next year.