Imagine a map of San Diego County riven through with a series of crooked, twisting capillaries, all headed toward 7 o’clock, combining into bigger and bigger veins, until, nearly to the coast, they gather into two thick arteries that, after passing under Interstate 5, merge into a single waterway north of Naval Base San Diego. Just before that southern digit dives under the Five to carry away all of the water in the 16,000-acre Chollas Creek Watershed, though, is Chollas Creek itself, an approximately 30- to 40-foot wide concrete-sided trough that, on Jan. 22, 2024, pulsed with millions and millions of gallons of water, rain that fell on Spring Valley and Lemon Grove, both of which experienced torrential flooding; that fell on sections of I-15 and I-805; that fell on National City, where scores of people were displaced by flooding; and that fell on the San Diego neighborhoods of Encanto, Rolando and Mountain View. All that water finally collected and pooled in, under and around the communities of Southcrest and Shelltown, where it sought any egress it could, whether that was the creek itself or an alley running behind Beta Street, and flowed into and through 400-500 homes, many occupied by immigrants or families from underserved populations, many of them, if not most, among the poorest people living in San Diego. San Diego Sep 11, 2024 700+ flood victims sue City of San Diego, alleging it failed to maintain Chollas Creek flooding Jan 26, 2024 San Diego storm drone tour: The Great Flood of 2024 San Diego Jan 27, 2024 San Diego spearfisherman hailed as hero for saving neighbors from floodwaters San Diego Jan 23, 2024 Photos show damage left behind by record-setting January storm San Diego Jan 24, 2024 ‘Where's the help?' San Diego residents blame a debris-filled Chollas Creek for flooded homes Weeks after the flooding that submerged those communities before the stormwater finally ran out to the sea, bulldozers and bobcats, under the umbrella of an emergency declaration, finally scraped the creek — “dredged” it, in bureaucrat parlance — so successfully that, after a Pineapple Express blew into town the following week, the floodway was finally up to the job, taming a raging river, one mastered by the hands of engineers. As bad as things that day a year ago, they would have been even worse if not for Hurricane Kay, which arrived in San Diego in September 2022 as Tropical Storm Kay. On Sept. 9 of that year, San Diego set a new daily precipitation record for that day of 0.59 inches of rain, beating the old high of 0.09 inches set in 1976, according to the National Weather Service of San Diego. The week before, the staff at the city’s stormwater department obtained an emergency declaration, based on a weather forecast of 0.7 inches, prompting city crews to spring into action in what is known as Alpha Channel, the one down by Southcrest and Shelltown. Workers scrambling over the course of two days managed to clear 2,178 tons of “accumulated sediment, vegetation and debris” from a 442-linear-foot section of the waterway and from Ocean View Channel in the Mountain View neighborhood, about a mile to the north, where flooding also occurred on Jan. 22. The problem was, in the words of a nameless city worker, “accumulated material had constricted hydraulic capacity” in the channel, prompting the work on both sides of the 40th Street Bridge. On Jan. 23, 2024, however, it had become abundantly clear that the “emergency” work had been too little, too late, and, in the wake of the Great Flood of 2024, nearly 600 homes and the lives of the thousands of San Diegans who resided in them, had been profoundly and forever changed. A look back, one year later by Audra Stafford Volunteers gather supplies for those still impacted by Jan. 22 floods, one year later San Diego flood victims, city leaders recount progress since January 2024 flooding By Jeanette Quezada