all you got to do is call
Posted on 02/08/2017 1:22:35 PM PST by nickcarraway
'Everything's Being Destroyed': Los Gatos Woman Pleads for Help on Facebook Live After Mudslide Destroys Property
Three homes owned by one family on an off-the-grid Los Gatos, California property were devastated in a “massive mudslide” during heavy storms on Tuesday, and a daughter who lives there used Facebook Live to plead for help.
“Everything’s being destroyed,” Jennifer Ray, 32, a stay-at-home mom, is heard saying on the 7:47 a.m. post, her voice teary and frantic. “The dogs are trapped in the car. Oh my God.”
In an interview on Wednesday with NBC Bay Area, Ray said she didn’t know what else to do because there is no cell service in that area, and her land line was dead. Luckily, she has satellites on the property, and so her Wi-Fi was working. She streamed what was going on – it was the only way she thought she could let the world know she was in trouble.
Los Gatos is a small unincorporated town in Santa Clara County, which comprises starkly different types of neighborhoods, from the extremely affluent, to the extremely secluded. Ray and her family live way off the beaten track on Bear Creek Road between Big Basin Redwoods State Park and the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve.
Three homes owned by one family on an off-the-grid Los Gatos, California property were devastated in a “massive mudslide” during heavy storms on Tuesday, and a daughter who lives there used Facebook Live to plead for help. Bob Redell reports.
Her friends quickly chimed in, many of them saying that they’d call for help. But crews couldn’t even get to her property at first; it was covered in mud. California was pummeled Tuesday with storms, flooding and mudslides on Tuesday, following a wet January that has saturated the once drought-stricken state.
Eventually, she, her mother, her sister and three kids got into two cars that they were able to get free from the brown muck that had engulfed the five acres she lives on. And they drove to her grandmother’s house in San Mateo, where she is staying indefinitely. Her husband, a union wire man, her brother-in-law who works in the Menlo school district, and her father, David Marzetta, who is out of work with an injured kneed, all stayed behind.
There was a "giant landslide," Marzetta said on Wednesday in a raincoat covered in mud as he surveyed his property. "Debris everywhere. My first thought, 'How are my kids? How are my grand kids?' "
The good news is that no one was injured when the mudslide took her pregnant sister’s home off its foundation and washed her car and tool shed away. A roof ripped off. Ray said her sister’s home is unlivable.
The loose mud also shoved the play equipment in her own backyard closer to her own house, which actually stayed intact. Her father's home wasn't totally damaged either. But a friend, Tina Foster, set up a GoFundMe page, to help pay for expenses that insurance won't cover and replace lost belongings, especially for Ray's sister, Jessica Ward.
While all this was happening, Ray’s two children witnessed Mother Nature at work. “All we could do is watch as it all came down and trap my mom's dogs in her car,” she said. When she saw a roof floating by in the muck, she feared the worst: “I was thinking my sister and my niece were dead.”
Ray knows that where she chose to live is remote and prone to fires, mountain lions, falling trees and mudslides. But it was her father’s dream to live there with his daughters, which they have been doing, quite happily, for two years.
“We knew the dangers of living off the grid,” she said, but because of her father’s desire to live together, she said “we knew we wanted to try it.”
As for her father, he is the “strongest man” that Ray knows, but the mudslide tearing their family apart, at least temporarily, was too much for him to bear. “Yesterday, he cried as he held my sister,” she said. “It was heartbreaking to watch my father’s dreams…wash away.”
As for what’s next, Ray and her family are trying to sort out what insurance will pay for and what it won’t. But she knows she wants to get back to their home as soon as they can, even though her father said he's thinking twice about where he chose to live; not for his safety but for the others.
“It’s a beautiful place to raise our kids,” she said. “As a family we know we can get through it together. We do love it up there.”
Property is probably worth 2-3M if its where I think it is.
Buck up, Buttercup.
There’s something sad and pathetic about spending your last moments on earth begging for help on Facebook.
Fortunately for her - she lived.
Since she is up in the unincorporated mountain area, it’s probably not that much.
Wait, what happened to the dogs??
Everyone will assume she’s moaning about Trump and ignore her.
I know the area well. I remember covering a similar run of storms back in 87...Was traveling with sheriff deputies. He ordered one family to leave. They said everything is fine. He stuck his nightstick into the hillside up to the hilt, a good 18 inches I’d say. That hillside was directly behind their back windows and it was saturated to the max.
Where we live now, its been raining all day. Probably a good inch inch and a half today followed by two inches tomorrow. The ground is already saturated. Luckily, we do not live on a hillside, although we do live on five acres, gently slope, do danger of sliding away, Floating away maybe, but not sliding away.
Love Creek 1981 again, Santa Cruz Mountains. Lives lost, an entire neighborhood wiped out due to mudslides. Nasty stuff and there are all sorts of folks nestled in the hills up there.
California will be crying for Federal Aid pretty soon.
“California will be crying for Federal Aid pretty soon.”
Sorry to say but between their vote on secession and Governor Jerry Brown’s antipathy towards immigration law they should not be receiving any aid.
Let them decide if they want to be Americans before they start making demands on Americans.
Wait, what happened to the dogs??
...
The only reason I finished reading the article.
all you got to do is call
I know the area as well, very desirable place to live in all of the Santa Clara valley.
Should we start demanding their succession?
“Luckily, she has satellites on the property...”
Huh???
vampires
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