Santa Rosa residents brace for flooding, slides in burn scar areas
SANTA ROSA -- Many people in the North Bay are working hard to keep their homes safe from the storm.
Peter Bizaca and his son Luka Bizaca were filling up sandbags in the rain at a Santa Rosa sandbag station on Friday.
"What we're trying to do is just to create a barrier with these sandbags, which prevents the water from coming into our garage," Peter Bizaca said.
They weren't alone. The station on Stony Point Road was busy on Friday with many homeowners filling up sandbags to take home.
"The last time we had an atmosphere river here in Santa Rosa, the garage got flooded so I thought 'this year, hey, let's be proactive and let's use some sandbags and see what happens,'" Bizaca said.
He said his backyard is a little higher than the garage door entrance so, when it rains a lot, water flows in.
Farther east from Bizaca's home, in the Glass Fire burn scar areas, the Santa Rosa fire department was preparing for mudslides and debris flows.
"Until those hills stabilize and we get the regrowth that we need, they are still susceptible to significant rain events like this," said Paul Lowenthal, the division chief/fire marshal with the Santa Rosa fire department.
He said the Glass Fire burn scar caused a major flooding on Oct. 24, 2021 in the Bennett Valley neighborhood. Streets and homes were submerged after a nearby creek overflowed its banks.
"When the water essentially sheets off of our burn scar here locally, it impacts what we refer to as the Santa Rosa Creek watershed," Lowenthal explained. "When the Santa Rosa Creek starts to fill up, a lot of our smaller tributary creeks that flow into that can't do it as easily as they typically would because they're being challenged by the volume of water in the larger creek and it essentially leads to backups in some areas."
Homeowners said they welcome the rain, just not one storm after another.