Two months have passed since a torrential spring storm triggered a landslide on Nelson Road in Scotts Valley.
Two months have passed since a torrential spring storm triggered a landslide on Nelson Road in Scotts Valley. While the weather may have cleared, the road is still blocked. Residents are still dependent on a temporary access road to get to their homes.
County officials say that the problem is the cost, $2.5 million, to clear the road. The county simply doesn’t have it, and is waiting for state and federal relief. But state relief is not quick in coming, either. Since the state government doesn’t have it, Gov. Jerry Brown wrote a letter to President Obama in April, asking for emergency relief funds to assist 17 California counties, including Santa Cruz. That funding never came, and it doesn’t look likely to come in the near future. The storms that struck California this spring are yesterday’s news. Now the focus is on the tornado-stricken communities of Alabama, Missouri and Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, the county can’t even be certain that the risk of landslides is over. A geo-technical assessment of the site by county officials could take a few more months to complete, and there is a regular stream of anecdotal evidence that rocks are still falling and the ground is not yet settled.
That leaves the residents of Nelson Road in the lurch. While neighbors of the isolated community are helping each other out, with the road still blocked they are feeling even more isolated from the rest of the county. Read more at Fox 35.
