SAN DIEGO — The San Diego River Park Foundation will be hiking the riverbed all day Wednesday ahead of Thursday’s storm to help warn anyone currently there to evacuate.
Teams will fan out from Santee to the ocean, making sure they can give everyone they can notice.
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“Whenever we get a big rain, we see the river flood and it floods really fast,” said Sarah Hutmacher, who runs the San Diego River Park Foundation. “The ground is very saturated, nowhere for water to go but up.”
As of last Thursday, the foundation reported that 283 people were staying along the river. Tiffani Gandara, who’s been homeless for four months, was in a tent in the riverbed when it flooded last week. She lost all her belongings.
“We had to bunker down the best we could. We had a tarp over a broken tent, still getting rained on. The wind was terrible,” said Gandara. “Everything we had was completely ruined.”
Hutmacher says she hopes to warn people to get to higher ground.