Planada residents spent decades building their lives in the Central Valley community. A brutal series of storms destroyed what they had.
PLANADA, Calif. — Until the floodwaters came, until they rushed in and destroyed nearly everything, the little white house had been Cecilia Birrueta’s dream.
She and her husband bought the two-bedroom fixer-upper 13 years ago, their reward for decades of working minimum wage jobs, first cleaning houses in Los Angeles and now milking cows and harvesting pistachios in California’s Central Valley.
The couple replaced the weathered wooden floors, installed a new stove and kitchen sink and repainted the living room walls a warm burgundy. Here, they raised their three children, the oldest now at the University of California, Davis. They enjoyed tomatoes, peaches and figs from neighbors who worked on the nearby farms.
Ms. Birrueta and her husband felt content. Until last month. Until the floodwaters came.
A brutal set of atmospheric rivers in California unleashed a disaster in Planada, an agricultural community of 4,000 residents in the flatlands about an hour west of Yosemite National Park. During one storm in early January, a creek just outside of town busted through old farm levees and sent muddy water gushing into the streets.
For several days, the entire town looked like a lagoon. Weeks after record-breaking storms wreaked havoc across California and killed at least 21 people, some of the hardest hit communities are still struggling to recover.
The flood ruined the two cars owned by Ms. Birrueta and her family and destroyed most of their clothes. The walls with the burgundy paint that she had carefully picked out had rotted through. Their house may need to be demolished.
Ms. Birrueta, her husband and their 14-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter had to move into a camp that typically houses migrant farmworkers, who arrive each spring with few belongings and the hope of building a life like the Birruetas had. There, 41 families from Planada are staying in long, beige cabins and relying on space heaters for warmth because the camps lack furnaces.
“We came as immigrants, we started with nothing,” said Ms. Birrueta, 40, who was born in Mexico. “We bought a place of our own that we thought would be safe for our kids, and then we lost it. We lost everything.”
Nine miles east of Merced in California’s agricultural heartland, Planada’s wide streets are dotted with bungalows and lead to a central park shaded by towering spruce and elm trees. Less than two square miles, Planada was created in 1911 to be an idyllic, planned farming community — its name means “plain” in Spanish, a nod to its fertile, low-lying lands — but was eventually abandoned by its Los Angeles developers.
The quiet town, surrounded by almond orchards and corn fields, has since become a desirable place for farmworkers with families to settle. When California farmworkers marched through Planada last summer on their way to the State Capitol in Sacramento, hundreds of children lined the streets to cheer them on.
The recent floods dealt a painful blow to a community in which more than a third of households are impoverished. Planada is more than 90 percent Latino and overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking. Roughly a quarter of residents are estimated to be undocumented immigrants, making them ineligible for some forms of disaster relief.
Agricultural workers in California are often on the front lines of catastrophes. They worked during the early, uncertain days of the Covid-19 pandemic, have endured record heat waves and toiled in the smoke-choked air that gets trapped in the Central Valley during wildfires.
During the recent floods, tens of thousands of farmworkers most likely lost wages because of water damage to California’s crops, compounding their already precarious financial situations, said Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesman for the United Farm Workers of America.
“The very workers who put food on our table are getting hot meals from the Salvation Army,” said Mr. De Loera-Brust. “Whether California is on fire or underwater, the farmworkers are always losing.”
On a recent morning in Planada, huge piles of furniture were stacked more than six feet high along the curb, as if standing guard in front of each home. Once cherished possessions had become trash: A child’s tricycle. A green velvet armchair. An engraved wooden crib.
