Residents in Palm Desert community rescued by raft after flooding on Monday
“It's painful, it's very, very painful that i moved out here a year ago i put a lot of money into making it my home to see it really just go to waste snow, you know, and i don't know if it'll ever get back to the way i would want to have it,” said Lydia Duran, a resident of the Spanish Walk community, off of Frank Sinatra and Gerald Ford in Palm Desert.
Duran said she just moved to the community and now she stands to lose everything because of this weekend’s historic storm.
“I think most of my furniture will be damaged by the time all of it is over. With this heat and no air conditioning, it's just a matter of time before mold and mildew start setting in,” Duran said.
Duran is like many in the community whose homes are now entrenched in flood water despite doing everything right.
“When the rain started to come down, my neighbors offered to put sandbags at my front door, because we thought that maybe it would deter water from coming in. It didn't,” Duran said.
The neighborhood is hardly recognizable after the flood. What is now a lake was a grassy park for residents to enjoy just a few days ago.
The flooding was so devastating in this community that rescue teams had to use these rafts behind me here to rescue people who were trapped in their homes.
“It's, it's humbling. It's humbling. We take a lot of things for granted," said Clandestine Acacio-Sum, a resident of the community.
Acacio-Sum is describing what it was like to be rescued in one of these rafts. She didn’t realize how badly she was affected by the flood until she went downstairs this afternoon.
"I had actually just finished cooking our food for lunch before somebody started pounding on the door. And lo and behold, my whole front floor, first floor was flooded,” Acacio-Sum said.
She and her son had to evacuate along with six of their neighbors, still she expressed her empathy for those who experienced the worst of the flood.
“My neighbor, miss Linda, one of our condos, is all on the first floor. And so her whole place she was just telling me everything she owns is destroyed. So i feel for her. It's just it's, it's crazy,” Acacio-Sum
“We've been monitoring the walking up and down the streets yesterday knocking on my neighbor's doors, we got a couple of older neighbors just making sure if they need anything texting back and forth,” said Spanish Walk resident Scott Bryant
Bryant is trying his best to be there for his neighbors during these hard times.
“I mean, we know everybody here, and that's seen people sitting on the sidewalks being rafted out here with all their belongings. It's, again, it's just like I'm saying disbelief, and I feel so bad for everybody,” Bryant said.
Bryant is not alone when he says he hopes to never see something like this again.
“It's a once-in-a-century, you know, type of a situation but hopefully we can learn from and prevent it from ever happening again," Bryant said.
Cal Fire reported that the flooding at Spanish Walk created an electrical hazard. RivCoReady are offering assistance to people who can no longer be in their homes.
