Around 9 a.m. on Nov. 8, 2022, Quentin Fears noticed a small amount of water in the drainage tunnel he called home. This was unusual, so he emerged, only to find that the larger flood-control channel just outside his tunnel was filled with a violent, fast-rising torrent of water. One of his friends — perched on a bed that was now a raft — was being swept away.
For over a decade, Fears, a soft-spoken 51-year-old, has lived in and around the flood-control channel that runs under Interstate 10 in the Southern California suburb of Ontario. After storms, a little water often runs down the center of the concrete channel. But Fears had never seen a flood like this one. “It was raging,” he said.
Ultimately, a record-breaking 1.8 inches of rain fell on Ontario, exceeding the normal rainfall amount for the entire month in just two days.
“As I stood there, it rose, and it was rushing bad” — at least four feet deep, said Fears, who managed to pull his friend to safety.
Dozens of unhoused people lived in and around the flood channel near John Galvin Park, drawn to the area’s relative safety from the weather and law enforcement. But the storm swiftly inundated Ontario’s flood infrastructure, which included concrete channels built to sluice water away from houses, businesses and other structures and into a series of holding basins.
Around 10 people were swept away on Nov. 8, with some carried over three miles down the channel, which runs north-south through the city, through dark tunnels under Little League fields, busy streets and a portion of the Ontario International Airport into a catch basin. Rescuers saved several, but search efforts continued for over a week. Three people died: Anthony “Poopsie” Ray Lopez, Madeline Velasquez and Josephine Guadalupe Dominguez. Lopez and Vela-squez lived in the channel, while Dominguez was visiting to provide aid.
On that Tuesday morning, Pandora Naranjo, who knew Lopez and Velasquez, woke to the sound of rushing water. The channel was still dry, though, so after trying in vain to rouse her friends, she left to find a nearby restroom. By the time she returned, the water was rushing through, and her friends were gone. “It was out of control, it was going so fast,” she said.
ACROSS THE WEST, anti-camping ordinances and law enforcement sweeps are pushing unhoused people into increasingly marginal spaces on the fringes of cities. Many camp along washes, flood channels and rivers. It’s just one of the many ways the climate and homelessness crises are colliding, leaving unhoused people increasingly exposed to extreme weather.
“Cities and states have made it virtually impossible to stay in safer locations,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “And the outcome is people experiencing homelessness are at an even greater risk for extreme weather events.”
Fears grew up in Rancho Cucamonga, a nearby suburb. He moved to Ontario in the early 2000s but struggled to pay for housing. Over the years, he remained in the area, periodically living with friends. But lately, he said, this channel has been the only place he can go.
Ontario contracts with nonprofits and other organizations to provide limited services for unhoused people, but Fears’ relationship with the city has been largely hostile. “Their aim is not to house us here or keep us here,” he said, it’s to push unhoused people out of town.
“Cities and states have made it virtually impossible to stay in safer locations. And the outcome is people experiencing homelessness are at an even greater risk for extreme weather events.”
In more visible locations, he said, authorities quickly remove unhoused people. Sometimes the reaction is more subtle; a park gazebo and other covered structures that were used for shelter were removed, for example. Other than a limited motel voucher program, Ontario has no bad-weather or emergency shelter options.
“There’s nowhere really else to go,” Fears said. “Everywhere else, if it’s an open field or whatnot, (the police) are on them real quick.”
The channel became a permanent home for many, including Naranjo, who found herself unhoused about three years ago. She bounced between parks and hotels, then found the channel and stayed, she said, drawn by the sense of family and community. Naranjo’s neighbors made sure that everyone got food and spread warnings when police were nearly, she said: “We were just watching out for each other, always.”
GIVEN CALIFORNIA’S cycles of extreme drought and heavy rainfall, places that may have felt relatively safe and dry can suddenly turn deadly. In San Diego, according to the nonprofit San Diego River Park Foundation, the number of people living by the San Diego River grew after the city’s camping ban took effect in July 2023. About a dozen people were rescued there that August, during Tropical Storm Hilary.
When an atmospheric river hit California this February, Anaheim first responders rescued a woman from a storm drain that fed into the Santa Ana River; authorities believe she had been living in the drain. Farther upstream, 10 people were rescued after river-bottom encampments in Riverside were inundated. And in San Jose, people living along the Guadalupe River were forced to flee. Just a few days later, San Jose officials approved plans to clear all the encampments along part of the river and create a “no-return zone.”
In Ontario, a lawsuit filed by the three victims’ estates and families alleges that the city and San Bernardino County knew that people lived in the channel when they opened the floodgates during the November storm. The suit states that that officials acted “with deliberate indifference to” the lives of those in the channel.
“The government, of course, shouldn’t pick and choose who to protect,” said Christian Contreras, a lawyer representing the victims. “The government shouldn’t pick and choose who is worthy of life.”
San Bernardino County and the city of Ontario have denied liability in the deaths and declined to comment on this story, citing the pending litigation.
“I’ve seen on TV where there’s a fire or storms or whatever and you see that they’re warning everybody, and they never warned us at all,” said Naranjo.
“They should have gotten us out in time,” she said.
WITH CLIMATE CHANGE bringing more extreme weather even as the West’s housing crisis grows, experts say that unhoused communities need to be better integrated into disaster planning.
Matt Fowle, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who tracks deaths among unhoused people in the U.S., found a 141% increase in mortality from environmental causes across 22 localities between 2011 and 2020. The environmental deaths he tracked fell into two categories: extreme heat and extreme cold. Other environmental causes, including floods, can be hard to pin down; a death certificate, for example, would not cite “flood” as the cause of death, instead labeling it as an accident or drowning.
“I think those deaths are preventable with some planning,” Fowle said.
In practice, nonprofits and other community aid groups that work with unhoused populations often end up warning people about extreme weather and natural disasters. But greater coordination with government agencies is needed, according to Jamie Vickery, whose research at the University of Washington included work on extreme weather-risk communication to unhoused communities. (She is now employed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
In 2022 a graduate student with whom Vickery worked, Joanne Medina, found that in cities and counties with high rates of homelessness, less than a quarter of their emergency-preparedness plans included specific strategies to address the safety of unhoused people.
Vickery stressed the need to improve coordination across agencies and between the government and organizations that serve unhoused populations. Government directives not only need to be clear, she said; they must account for the on-the-ground circumstances of people living outdoors.
“If we give guidance to someone that they need to take shelter inside, and that’s not an option, then how can we better improve those options?” said Vickery.
IN THE INTERMEDIATE aftermath of the Ontario flood, the city provided hotel vouchers for several weeks, occasionally up to a few months. After those ran out, Naranjo and others returned to the relative privacy and protection of the channel. But since the flood, Naranjo said, police have come by more often, telling people to leave or risk having their belongings cleared out. Naranjo moved a few hundred feet away, outside the flood infrastructure, to a narrow, elevated strip of land wedged between Interstate 10 and a small motel.
“If we give guidance to someone that they need to take shelter inside, and that’s not an option, then how can we better improve those options?”
“I miss them,” Naranjo said, referring to the friends who died in the November flood. “I miss Madeline and I miss Poopsie (Lopez). I didn’t know JoJo (Dominguez) too well, but I miss her, too. It’s just sad that they had to pass away in order for anything to happen.”
In April, the channel’s concrete walls were spray-painted with memorial tags: RIP Maddie, RIP Poopsie, RIP JoJo. On the floor, POOPSIE is painted in bright yellow block letters. Naranjo ventured back sometimes, ducking into a concrete tunnel below Princeton Street on occasion for some semblance of protection from the cold.
Fears remained in the same spot, a more elevated tunnel than the one where Naranjo’s friends lived. These days, he said, the police use bullhorns to warn people to evacuate ahead of storms. But those warnings don’t necessarily come with a new place to live.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Fears said.
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This article appeared in the June 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Rising waters.”
