(Tonya Mosley/KQED)īy the time San Jose issued an evacuation order, Juanita Wilson was already standing waist-deep in floodwaters. I'm reporting a flood.' Naglee Park resident Jeffrey Hare points to the flood line of his neighbor's home off Coyote Creek. 'They said they were sending out a technician. 'When I called emergency dispatch, they put me in touch with the San Jose Water Co.,' Hare said. Hare said he had to knock on doors to warn his neighbors. Twenty years later, as the creek began to rise again, Hare was back knocking on those doors. It was Super Bowl Sunday and the city had failed to alert residents. He installed that pole in 1997, when he saw the creek overflow the first time. 'We couldn’t get through to any of them.'įour days before the flood, Hare had begun taking water level readings of Coyote Creek using a pole to measure its rise. 'We were trying to contact the city, we were trying to contact the water district, we were trying to contact anyone we could,' Hare said. Wilson's neighbor, Jeffrey Hare, had known for days that the flood was coming and he was frantic. 'So I opened the door and there was water everywhere and I just kept thinking, I can't go. 'I'm like, what are you talking about,' Wilson said. As she grabbed her keys to head to the door, she heard firefighters yelling over a loudspeaker. (Courtesy of Jeffrey Hare)Īs the floodwaters were reaching her neighborhood, she was preparing for a trip to the DMV. 19, 2017, two days before the neighborhood was flooded. A night photo of the pole Jeffrey Hare uses to measure Coyote Creek water levels. 'We had no warning from the city, none from the county, nothing at all,' Wilson said. South of San Jose, the dam was built in 1950. That area is near Coyote Creek, which floods whenever Anderson Dam overflows. It was also critical of the way the city handled notifying residents, such as Juanita Wilson, who was living in the Rock Springs neighborhood when the flood occurred.

The report, commissioned by San Jose and conducted by emergency management consultant Witt O’Brien's, gave the city an 'A' for how it responded after the Feb.

A new report could give insight into why San Jose failed to notify more than 14,000 residents that their neighborhoods were under a flood threat in February.

Coyote creek