Widespread damage to homes and businesses and major flooding in rivers and roadways — the storm of January 9, 2023, left a big imprint on the San Luis Obispo area.
“It was bigger than what we all expected,” said Brett Jones, owner of Nautical Bean coffee shop.
Several inches of rain poured down in just hours. Businesses across the Central Coast, like Abbey Carpet and Flooring off High Street in San Luis Obispo, were battered by the storm.
“One of my employees goes, ‘Brett, the carpet place sign is floating down the street,’” Jones recalled.
Nautical Bean is located just next door to Abbey Carpet.
“It happened a little bit before 6 a.m. One of my employees called me and she's like, ‘It’s really raining hard. There's a lot of water coming up.’ I was like, 'Okay, whatever. I'll come down and help you guys.’ And so I come down and turn down Parker Street, and my truck just hit a wall of water, three feet,” Jones said.
The coffee shop was prepared with sandbags and storm shutters, but that didn’t stop the incredible amount of water outside from coming in.
“I was fortunate to have one of my employees in there with me, and we battled it all morning, you know, with mops and dry vacs and towels and dumping buckets of water down the sink. It was intense,” Jones said.
Scott Jalbert, San Luis Obispo County Emergency Services Manager, says he knew something serious was happening that day when he checked his unusually elevated rain gauge.
While Jalbert says the alerts and systems the county uses were effective during the storm, the one big takeaway for his office was to get more personnel in-house earlier to get the information out to the community as accurately and quickly as possible.
“Everything in place — are you ready for the next one to hit? We do our best to be ready. We're always monitoring the weather situation,” he said.
Major flooding and rain events like last year are rare — water managers expect significant flooding every 25 to 30 years — but the City of San Luis Obispo says helpful tools like pre-winter surveys and vegetation management are in place to mitigate the effects of the next storm as best they can.
