Storm’s Severity May Be Key to South Bay Flood Suit

Sulpecio Ramos rushed home that day as soon as he heard the warning. “The water is rising,” his brother’s frantic voice said on the other end of the line.

It was Feb. 2, 1988, and, when Ramos returned to his Lauriston Drive home in the South Bay, he saw floodwaters lapping at his front door. A freak rainstorm had turned the low-lying parts of South San Diego into a nightmarish version of Venice.

But when Ramos looked out across his yard at the catchment basin built by the city to stave off such flooding, he saw an even stranger sight, he recalled Thursday. About a dozen large trucks that had been parked inside the basin were now afloat, bobbing uneasily near the reservoir’s rim.

Now those trucks, the basin, and even the amount of rainfall recorded during the storm are the focus of a lawsuit by area residents against the city of San Diego. If the 17 families whose homes were flooded that day prevail, the city could be liable for damages of more than $10 million, according to Chief Deputy City Atty. Alan Sumption.

Basin Leased as Parking Lot

The city should be held responsible because its Property Department leased the basin as a parking lot to a trucking company, said attorney Gary Elster, who is representing the residents in the trial in Superior Court. As water swept the trucks off the basin floor, truck parts clogged the catchment basin’s drains and spillway, sending the overflow downhill toward the homes, Elster said.

“The furniture, some of the appliances, they were floating,” Ramos said. “It was a mess.”

But Sumption, who is defending the city, argues that the storm so inundated the South Bay neighborhood that the basin would have overflowed--trucks or no trucks. “This case is just ridiculous,” he said.

The city will not attempt to defend the decision to lease out the catchment basin, according to Sumption: “It was a mistake, there is no question about that.” The property department, said Sumption, “saw it as a revenue source.”

Jim Spotts, head of the Property Department, refused comment.

Sumption said he will focus his defense on the severity of the rainstorm. No measurement was taken in the neighborhood, but an expert meteorologist armed with wind charts and satellite photos of the storm has estimated rainfall there at 3.3 inches, Sumption said. Another expert testifying for the residents is expected to argue that rainfall cannot be measured that way.

“We built a catch basin to withstand a (once-in-a-century) storm . . . but what we got is something that statistically only happens once every 200 or 500 years,” Sumption said. “And now Elster wants to punish us for it.”

On the day of the storm, the National Weather Service recorded 2 inches of rain in downtown San Diego and 4 inches in Imperial Beach, which is closer to the residents on Lauriston and Paxton drives who are suing the city.

“It defies definition,” a meteorologist with the National Weather Service said at the time. “No one knows how they got that much when nobody else did. I’ve never heard of that kind of rain here.”

Most residents suing the city declined comment Thursday. But, the day after the storm in 1988, some of them talked about the flood’s consequences. “The furniture’s shot. Anything you can name that’s under 4 feet high--the refrigerator, the stove, the microwave--it’s all ruined,” Jack McKindsey, a Paxton Drive resident, said then.

In their $8.7-million claim against the city, the families demanded compensation for reduced home values and emotional distress, according to Sumption. “They had one woman who fell three months after the flooding and underwent brain surgery, and they claimed she fell because of stress” inflicted by the flood, Sumption said.

Now Before the Jury

When the city rejected the claim, Elster said he would ask for more than $10 million in damages if the city is found liable in the flooding, according to Sumption. The first part of the jury trial, which began Wednesday before Superior Court Judge Thomas Lavoy, will settle the question of liability, and the second part will decide the damage award, if any.

“It is one of the bigger lawsuits pending against the city,” said Sumption. “But it certainly does not set a record for claims.”

If the city loses this case, it will not be the first time residents have been compensated for the effects of a flood. After a flood in 1983, some families won an out-of-court settlement of $1.4 million, according to Sumption. In that suit, residents contended that construction upstream of the South San Diego Industrial Park contributed to the flooding. The current suit also claims that the same industrial park contributed to flooding, Sumption said.

The liability portion of the trial is expected to take five weeks, both lawyers said. The Metropolitan Transit Development Board, which owns the two culverts adjoining the catchment basin, is also named in the suit.

Ramos, meanwhile, has other reminders of the flood around him. “I am still repairing some of the damage,” he said.