When Francisca Lopez woke up to sirens and speakers outside her home loudly blaring for her to evacuate, she had no idea what to expect. She feared a war or some natural disaster had struck, so she grabbed a few jackets, dressed her 10-year-old son, and left immediately. Within hours, the overflowing waters from the Pajaro levee poured into her neighborhood, flooding her home and ruining much of what she owned.
One year later, Lopez stood in front of the Pajaro home where she rented a room for three years, which was left uninhabitable after the 2023 flood. “We lost everything,” said Lopez, who now lives in Watsonville, in Spanish. “It’s so hard to start over. I was just starting to build something. We had the warmth of a home.”
Like Lopez, hundreds of other Pajaro residents are still recovering from the March 11 breach of the Pajaro levee, which forced the evacuation of thousands of people and flooded over 200 homes. More than $10 million dollars were distributed in federal, state and local aid to help survivors of the flood, according to Monterey County Communications Director Nicholas Pasculli. But many Pajaro residents such as Lopez received little to no aid because they lacked or lost the documentation that most required.
Maria Urbieta, right, along with fellow Pajaro residents gather during a community meeting at Casa de la Cultura in Pajaro, Calif., on Friday, March 1, 2024. Urbieta’s home was completely flooded by the floodwaters from the Pajaro levee breach on March 11, 2023. Since then She with her husband and two children has been staying in a hotel. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Monterey County still plans to dole out more than $5 million in state funds directly to the residents of Pajaro, with millions more going to businesses and disaster readiness efforts throughout the area. While officials promise the new aid will be offered to as many survivors as legally possible, some worry that the money is too little, too late.
In the initial aftermath of the flooding, Monterey County gave $750,000 in aid, and while FEMA offered aid, it was restricted to U.S. citizens and qualified immigrants, with stringent requirements that often resulted in claims being denied or only partially funded.
Pajaro resident Maria Urbieta experienced that firsthand when her home in Pajaro was completely flooded by the breach last year. When she applied for help from FEMA, the agency only gave her assistance to repair her heating system. Even after she found multiple quotes for the repair, it only paid for half, she said.
For the past year, Urbieta has been staying in a hotel with her husband and two children. She had worked running a day care out of her home, but after the flooding, she lost her main source of income. The economic pressure has been so extreme, that she once went to the hospital because she thought she was getting a heart attack. “I couldn’t stop crying,” she recalled in Spanish. The doctors told her she was suffering from acute anxiety.
The administrative hurdles and lack of aid left many to rely on nonprofits for help. Urbieta, for example, receives funds from the community group Casa de la Cultura to help pay for her hotel costs, and Lopez said that for nearly a month after the flooding, she lived off of $500 she received from Campesina Womb Justice.
Pajaro residents gather during a community meeting at Casa de la Cultura in Pajaro, Calif., on Friday, March 1, 2024. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
To make matters worse, farmworkers like Lopez lost months of income to flooded fields that lay fallow.
“We are like ghosts here,” said Lopez in Spanish, referring to those who, like her, lacked the documentation to get most aid. “We need to fight day and night to survive.”
“FEMA, they’re the sticklers of all sticklers. They want to see documentation with everything. They will deny you from three to four times before they give you anything like what you deserve,” said Tony Nuñez, marketing and communications manager at the Watsonville nonprofit Community Bridges.
FEMA did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Acknowledging the vast unmet need in Pajaro, several local leaders lobbied for state aid, and in June 2023, the state Legislature passed a budget bill offering $20 million to help Pajaro recover from the disaster. While the majority of the money was initially set aside for emergency preparedness, many community members fought for a larger share to go directly to individuals, and in December 2023, the county decided to set aside half of those funds for local businesses and residents.
In late February, the county approved a plan to give $5.4 million of that aid directly to the community, regardless of citizenship status. Of that, $1 million will go to any household that was evacuated as “food spoilage assistance” in gift cards of $200 to $600, since most of those who evacuated lost power and all their food went to waste.
The remaining $4.4 million will go to any of those households who suffered physical damage from the flooding, and includes housing assistance, help to repair homes and to repair or replace vehicles and belongings.
Flood waters cover most of Pájaro Valley, Calif., on Sunday, March 12, 2023. An atmospheric river storm broke through a levee along the Pájaro river inundating homes and businesses and leaving thousands of people without shelter. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
Applications are slated to open in person in late March at Pajaro Park and be available until late April. Catholic Charities of Monterey County and Community Bridges of Watsonville are set to distribute the funds.
“The community of Pajaro is not just numbers. They’re people, and they’re names and they’re experiences. And they have experienced a federal … process that removes that humanity and dignity,” said Kelsey Scanlon, Monterey County’s Director of the Department of Emergency Management. “One of our priorities was to focus on bringing back dignity to government services.”
Still, many members of the Pajaro community carry the compound scars of the levee breach followed by the experience of applying in vain for assistance.
After the levee break flooded Leonardo Torres-Gonzalez’s street, the moisture from the rain and stagnant water led to the black mold plaguing his apartment. When he tried to apply for help from FEMA, the agency asked him for a half-dozen documents. He provided proof of evacuation, hotel receipts, a note from his apartment complex about the mold, and a doctor’s note that highlighted the negative health effects because Torres-Gonzalez is disabled and his wife has asthma.
After everything, FEMA denied Torres-Gonzalez’s application for aid. He says he does not expect much more from the coming assistance. “There are too many requirements. … They are so hard with giving out help,” he said in Spanish.
In the face of such dire predicaments, Monterey County supervisors in late February asked those distributing the aid to be as flexible as possible with documentation. Current requirements allow those without documents to provide photo evidence of losses or obtain signed letters confirming residence in some cases. However, the county is liable to state audit for the aid, which limits how far they can bend the rules.
Even with the broader scope of the coming assistance, the aid only scratches the surface of the pain felt by the community, says Torres-Gonzalez. He catalogs so many tragedies that befell his community after the flood, people who lost work and food and furniture, and the psychological fallout: people in his apartment complex who began to use drugs, a friend who suffered a heart attack after he lost his job in the fields, a youth who took his own life after his family was displaced.
“We are in an abyss, in a hell that is easy to get into but hard to get out,” he said in Spanish. “The people are stressed out. They don’t want to know about problems (with aid), they want solutions, they want results.”
Scanlon acknowledges the problems in Pajaro go far beyond what the aid can solve, but still holds out hope that it will help as many people as possible. “Twenty million dollars will never be enough. The challenges this community faced were huge far before the disaster,” she said. “What we’re talking about is multigenerational impacts and trauma. And $20 million can never overcome that. But we can make a dent.”
Agencies helping residents affected by the Pajaro flooding:
Community Bridges — provides aid and a variety of services to residents of Watsonville and other areas of Santa Cruz County.
Catholic Charities — provides aid, disaster relief and case management services.
Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County — provides services to low-income residents of Santa Cruz.
Casa de la Cultura — provides aid, services, advocacy and a gathering space for farmworkers and community members from Watsonville to Salinas.
Campesina Womb Justice — a mutual aid project advocating for maternal and infant rights for farmworkers.
Center for Farmworker Families — a farmworker advocacy organization that distributes aid directly to farmworkers.
Community Foundation Santa Cruz County — a foundation that provides money for other organizations to assist communities.
