Flood Files: Resident Julie Craine Relives the Floods

Local resident Julie Craine lives on Capitola Avenue across the street from City Hall, placing her right at the mouth of . Craine, who works at Cava Wine Bar, and , thought she had seen it all after the , but it was the that really made the impact.

She recently sat down with Patch to share her story. 

Julie Craine: 
On Thursday, we were sitting here, and my housemate’s brother texted that there was a Soquel Creek warning. So, of course, the first thing I did was grab my camera and the dog and go down to see the flash flood warning.

We were looking at the raging river, and my housemate was getting nervous. She was like, ‘”Julie, really, we need to get out of here. These things can flash like crazy. We’ve got to get out of here. So I said, “OK, we’re heading to high and dry ground.” And then we came around the corner onto Capitola Avenue, and that’s when we saw the massive river that was hitting our front door.

We went up the road to . Frankie, the lady there, is super sweet. We were refugees. We had nothing. I had no phone. Nicole, my housemate, didn’t have her purse. Her phone died. And we had Arthur, the dog, so we couldn’t go inside anywhere. So, we went up there, and they put us in the back and gave us shelter and let us use their phones.

That time, the damage wasn’t that bad. We had about a 6-foot radius around the front door that was wet, that we cleaned up. There was about an inch of water in the laundry room and a few spots in my bedroom around the doors, but nothing devastating.

Nicole’s car got dented. She found a kid’s basketball hoop under her car. They got a whole garbage bag full of debris from the under-carriage of her car.

Then, Saturday morning, we were a little nervous with it raining all night. Nobody told us, nobody warned us, nothing. We woke up Saturday morning to the police yelling to each other, “The road is flooding. Put up barricades.” We never got a reverse-911. My housemate came into my room and said, “Oh, my God, we’re flooding again. You’ve got to get out.” I went from a dead sleep to up and out in five minutes. There was no time to think. The one thing I did do, thank God, was put my box of photographs up four stairs.

Both my boyfriend and housemate’s cars were parked right out front, so they moved them, because at this point, the water was only up to the curb across the street. In the time it took them to move their cars into safer areas, we couldn’t get back in the house. I met them at the door. We stood two doors down under the awning of our neighbor and just watched it get worse and worse and worse until we couldn’t watch anymore.

We couldn’t come back in until about 3:30. We came in and there was 2 inches of mud everywhere. We spent all day Sunday scrubbing, because it’s really silty. This stuff is like glue. They had to cut out a bunch of sheet rock from my room, because it’s going to mold.

I red-tagged my room myself. It's not safe in there. It's not sanitary. I moved my mattress upstairs and got my stuff out.

I haven’t heard anything from the city, but the landlord has been awesome, the property manager has been awesome, and it has been a good community effort. Everyone has been asking each other how we can help out, which has been really nice.