Weeks after king tides, Marin flood recovery slogs on

Regina Diaz looked up from the cash register at the Anchorage 5 restaurant in Sausalito and saw an older woman in a wheelchair and her companion slowly navigating a still-wet parking lot.

Diaz bounded outside to help the customers as they approached a water-absorbing straw log. It was a remnant of the tidal flooding early this month, when Diaz, her husband Luis and her brother-in-law had fortified the diner to keep 2 feet of brackish water from destroying the wooden interior.

“This way is easiest,” Diaz said, directing the customers to another entrance where there was no straw and piles of sandbags. “Let me help you over there, OK?”

Three weeks after record king tides that surrounded the diner receded, her stretch of Gate 5 Road — like other hard-hit areas — was not back to normal.

The eatery is one of many shoreline businesses still recovering from record floods in Marin’s low-lying coastal stretches.

“We’re hanging by a thread,” she said. “I want my customers to come in and enjoy it like they have for 23 years.”

Across Marin’s other flood-hit communities, such as homes and businesses near Corte Madera Creek, cleanup and recovery efforts are continuing. Some businesses were relatively unscathed. Others have taken weeks to recover. Others face months of work ahead.

Jody Niederkohr, a graphic artist who prints silkscreen designs on used clothes in his studio on Gate 5 Road, said the water was 17 inches deep.

“We knew to raise everything up,” he said. “This time around, we just had loss of production time.”

Laura Lienhard, who makes jewelry in a nearby shared studio at Varda Landing, said she spent weeks cleaning her workspace and tools.

“The studio had never flooded. So I wasn’t anticipating it,” she said. “Everything got covered in silt. Everything had to be hosed down and oiled.”

Nearby landlords faced bigger challenges. Along Gate 5 Road and Harbor Drive, crews were tending to the interiors and exteriors of buildings.

“We started doing demolition immediately,” said Mauro Dosolini, who owns 16,000 square feet of rental space and the Seahorse restaurant.

Dosolini, who has 20 tenants, including artists and woodworkers, stepped inside a large vacant studio. Plants from a nursery next door, which also flooded, filled one section. Around the perimeter, several feet of drywall and insulation had been removed from the flooring upward. A dehumidifier was humming.

“We put in fans to dry the place. Then we put in the dehumidifier. And then the ultraviolet filter that kills bacteria,” he said, referring to mold that can follow. An electrician will soon check the wiring, he said.

“We’ll make sure everything is perfectly safe again, and then we’ll seal the wall,” Dosolini said. “It’s going to take us three months.”

Outside, Dosolini walked around the property and pointed to pallets of cinderblocks. A construction worker was carefully adding them to an older barrier.

“I’m raising all my retaining walls around the property,” he said. “I want to be sure it’s OK for the next few years.”

“It’s every man for themselves,” said K.C. Pedersen, vice president of Clipper Yacht Harbor, which owns waterfront filled with rented office and marine supply buildings, artist studios, parking lots and bulkheads and docks servicing hundreds of boats.

“It’s all hands on deck for our staff,” he said. “We’re paying overtime for all our guys to be here, almost 24/7, on events like this. But the aftermath, it’s all on us.”

Pedersen said his hardest-hit building is the home of Jeff Brown Yachts on Harbor Road. A low spot at the end of a parking lot that hadn’t flooded in three decades funneled water toward the building’s first floor. Sandbagging didn’t stop the water from getting inside and saturating the cement slab, subfloor, flooring, drywall and insulation.

All that had to be replaced, as was the case in buildings that flooded along Marin’s shorelines. On Thursday, construction crews were finishing up with new flooring.

In Larkspur, the pace of cleanup and recovery efforts was similar. Some businesses and homes were in good shape, while others had a way to go.

Homes along Riviera Circle, whose backyards border a lagoon near Corte Madera Creek, had more than a foot of water swamp crawl spaces, garages and yards.

Driving through the neighborhood, one sees a handful of fenced-in yards piled with soggy boxes and furniture, construction debris stacked between homes and garage bays where the drywall has been pulled off, insulation removed, fans running.

A handful of residents showed up at the Larkspur City Council meeting on Wednesday. Ted Wilson asked why the public works department didn’t lower the lagoon level as in years past, and said more street cleanup was needed.

“There’s a lot of twigs and a ton of debris in the street that’s been there since that happened,” he said.

At Fitness SF in Corte Madera, located just off Highway 101 where Lucky Drive was inundated, the gym was busy on Thursday morning. Most clients took little notice of a smattering of rebuilding supplies in a corner of the lobby.

“We’re replacing flooring in four offices, some power strips and just anything that got wet,” said Ryan Davis, general manager. “January is the busiest month.”

During the flood, water reached a depth of 4 inches in part of the gym after sandbags failed, he said. The chain, which has five other gyms in the region, sent a team of 25 people to clean up before reopening.

Davis said the business owns the property, which means it would likely be eligible for a property tax break. The county said such relief is possible if the damage to the taxable property exceeded $10,000. The relief, which requires property owners to apply, doesn’t cover inventory or personal items.

Other business proprietors were unaware of the tax relief. They were facing a range of experiences with private insurers.

Lienhard said “none of my insurance covered any of this.”

Dosolini said he has insurance and said he expects it to cover the repairs that will be in the “tens of thousands of dollars.”

Pedersen, whose grandfather built the yacht harbor after World War II by covering the marshland with fill, said he has no flood coverage.

“It’s so hard to get flood insurance anywhere in the Marinship, specifically, because they know it’s settling and they know there’s a potential for flooding everywhere,” he said. “So we don’t have flood insurance anywhere on our property, which makes it really hard to get a loan.”

Marin County spokeswoman Laine Hendricks said the county was looking at other ways to help small businesses and homeowners, but those efforts hinged on ongoing assessments of damages and needed repairs.

“As we continue to assess the impacts and understand the numbers of homes and level of damage, there might be some things that unlock through the Small Business Administration,” she said.

At the same time, some local governments are making similar assessments. On Wednesday, Corte Madera will hold a flood board meeting to discuss the damage.

“We’re just not seeing the help materialize that we would expect from the federal government in a situation like this,” said Corte Madera Councilmember Eli Beckman. “The land that Corte Madera is built on, and the land that our flood control infrastructure is built on, is sinking. And the bay is rising.”