There was no time to grab his birth certificate, much less a stove or food or military service records.
As the San Diego River rose Sunday by Mission Valley, 69-year-old Nick Galban realized his tent wasn’t safe. Yet a leg had swollen from a spider bite, and Galban’s left knee was a replacement. He wasn’t moving anywhere fast.
Then, as rain pounded the riverbed, two firefighters appeared and pulled him to higher ground.
“It was just so quick,” Galban said in an interview near the site Monday.
Tropical Storm Hilary hit the region’s homeless population especially hard and strained a shelter system that regularly teeters at capacity. First responders rescued around a dozen people in the Morena area, and the city temporarily moved nearly 150 individuals from a new safe sleeping site to a shelter downtown.
Those who stayed outside during the downpour assessed the damage Monday.
“It was awful,” said T.J. Brown, a 34-year-old who spent hours digging a trench with a spade to divert water from his sleeping bag. “I didn’t know it was gonna be that bad.”
Outreach teams and police did notify many people about the storm, according to several homeless individuals and city officials.
“I was trying to get the people to wait in line for the emergency shelters,” Alicia Herrera, an outreach worker with Alpha Project, said in a phone interview. “But obviously there’s not enough space.”
On Thursday and Friday, she gave out tarps. As those disappeared, she offered rolls of plastic normally used to protect mattresses and advised people to huddle under awnings. If nothing else, they might keep dry.
Mayor Todd Gloria previously announced an additional 192 shelter spots.
One hundred and thirty eight of those, or about 72 percent, were filled during the rains, according to city spokesperson Ashley Bailey.
But some of the remaining beds may not have been accessible to every person. One 46-year-old man downtown recently said he had checked in with a shelter but was told only top bunks were available. Because a spinal cord infection made it hard to climb, he chose to stay outside.
The storm clouds posed a particular challenge to San Diego’s new safe sleeping site.
On Saturday, 157 people were living on a lot south of Balboa Park, at 26th Street and Pershing Drive. Part of the draw was that you could stay in a tent, and the site began quickly filling soon after opening this summer.
Yet the region’s first tropical storm since the Great Depression brought too many unknowns, and officials told everybody they needed to leave. In its place they offered Golden Hall, an aging shelter by the Civic Center that leaders have long tried to shutter.
Dozens chipped in Saturday to help clear the area within hours, according to Kelly Spoon, a spokesperson for Dreams for Change, the nonprofit overseeing the site. Tents were folded. Bikes locked to a fence. Participants were directed to pack enough clothes for four days, Spoon said.
All but about 10 people agreed to stay at Golden Hall, Bailey added.
The rains came Sunday. Low-lying areas were vulnerable, and waterways especially so.
Water beat dirt into mud and mud into rivulets that curled and swelled around encampments.
Around 8:45 p.m., more than two dozen firefighters and lifeguards arrived by the Mission Valley riverbed to help a small crowd wade through knee-deep water, according to an incident report and a San Diego Fire-Rescue Department spokesperson.
First responders soon spotted people on an island downstream, officials said. Crews asked for a helicopter, but the storm was too strong. They requested a drone, but that plan was scuttled by the winds. A swift water-rescue team eventually opted to search the area on their own.
The operation was called off after about an hour. Two people were eventually checked for hypothermia, but neither was taken to a hospital and their current condition wasn’t known.
Dullanni Waterman, 44, was in a large green tent Sunday night. It sat at an angle on a hill, just a few bushes from the Mission Valley YMCA.
His dog, Ginger, a 3-year-old American dingo, started whining. Waterman largely ignored her. They were far from where the river normally flowed.
The dog pawed a corner of the tent. He looked over. Water was inside.
They fled through the back.
On Monday, Waterman slowly pulled blanket after blanket through the front flap. Sweat gathered on his forehead in the humidity. He stepped over a pool and onto a log, pushing the wood into several inches of muck.
Waterman laid his bedding on piles of sticks. He’d had to call out of work — Waterman is a cashier at a hardware store — to see what could be saved. Hopefully he would be ready to take another shift Tuesday.
A few miles south, a handful of people walked across the safe sleeping site.
No tents were visible. Sandbags had been pushed to the edges. Several metal storage containers were now clustered near the back, by some port-a-potties, to hold what had been left behind.
A few men in a jobs program swept the asphalt. A street sweeper was on its way, and then the ground itself could be washed and sanitized, nonprofit representatives said. City officials hoped everyone could move back by Thursday at the latest.
If anybody chose not to return, the waiting list is long.
In the riverbed, some of the mud had dried by the afternoon. A handful of tents remained under a trolley line.
Brown, the man who had dug a trench, stroked a small puppy.
Did he feel safe now that the rains had stopped?
“It’s not safe anywhere,” he said. “But there’s safety in numbers.”
Staff photographer Ana Ramirez and writer Phillip Molnar contributed to this report.
