PLANADA — In 1910, the Los Angeles real estate developer J. Harvey McCarthy decided that this small agricultural town in the Central Valley would be his “city beautiful,” a model community and an automobile stop along the road to Yosemite.
An infusion of money brought Planada a bank, hotel, school, church and its own newspaper, the Planada Enterprise, by the following year. A celebration for the town’s first anniversary drew an estimated 10,000 people (though Planada had only several hundred residents) as the city had become the best-known place in Merced County.
But McCarthy eventually abandoned the community, located nine miles east of Merced, leaving its settlers to pick up the pieces. It remained a farming town and is now home to 4,000 mostly low-income and Spanish-speaking residents who work at nearby orchards.
In January, a brutal set of atmospheric rivers unleashed a disaster in Planada, where a nearby creek overflowed and sent muddy water gushing into streets. Pictures of Planada, which for several days looked like a lagoon, circulated on social media and news sites. The waist-high floodwaters destroyed hundreds of cars and homes, and created damage that residents are still struggling to recover from weeks later.
I recently visited Planada and wrote about the impacts of the storms, which pushed hundreds from their homes into camps typically used by farmworkers who come to Merced each spring to work in the fields. For many of these low-wage workers, the losses inflicted by the severe flooding will require tens of thousands of dollars to repair and years of rebuilding.
“We came as immigrants, we started with nothing,” said Cecilia Birrueta, who milks cows at a dairy nearby and whose home in Planada may need to be demolished. “We bought a place of our own that we thought would be safe for our kids, and then we lost it. We lost everything.”
Walking through the wide, dusty streets of the town recently, I saw crews in hazmat suits ripping out the floors at Planada Elementary, where floodwaters destroyed 4,000 books as well as desks, rugs and more. In front of the hardest-hit homes were piles of furniture taller than me, as most of those families’ belongings had to be thrown out because they were either soaked beyond salvage or covered in mold.
Though Planada is in a flood zone, most homeowners said they couldn’t afford to pay thousands of dollars for flood insurance. Besides, they said, so many years of severe heat and drought made wildfires seem a much greater concern than a deluge.
Maria Figueroa, a FEMA spokeswoman, told me that the agency would provide at most $41,000 per flooded household. The funds are intended to jump-start recovery, not cover a full rebuild. “We’re not an insurance agency,” she said.
Marie Boyer, who was recently fixing her pickup truck outside a pink bungalow she rents in Planada, told me that she offered to clean her neighbors’ flooded homes at no charge, since hers didn’t sustain severe damage. In most of the houses, however, almost nothing was left inside.
Boyer, 53, said she had watched over the past several weeks as Planada residents carried their destroyed belongings into dumpsters that had been placed on street corners.
Trash collectors would “empty them, and everybody would fill them right back up again,” said Boyer, who works as a housekeeper. “I don’t know if people here are going to make it through.”
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What you get
For $2.8 million: A three-bedroom condo in a midcentury-modern building in San Francisco, a 1951 bungalow in Los Angeles or an apartment near the beach in Carlsbad.
What we’re eating
Buttery cabbage and noodles.
Where we’re traveling
Today’s tip comes from Rich Eckert, who lives in San Francisco:
“I can rhapsodize about Yosemite and Lassen National Parks, the latter being the undiscovered jewel in the National Park System. But if I really had to name my favorites, it would be far closer to home, home being the Inner Richmond District of San Francisco.
It would start with a walk down the Embarcadero to Oracle Park, a beautiful gem among the nation’s newest baseball parks. After dinner and drinks at Perry’s Embarcadero after the game, I would be fortified for a trek through Chinatown, with the requisite stop for dim sum, up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower, down the Greenwich steps to Levi’s Plaza and the Blue Jean Museum. Then I would wind it up with a couple of cold refreshing adult beverages at Pier 23 before heading off to the Farmer’s Market at the Ferry Terminal and the California bus home.
The next day would start with a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and back, followed by lunch at the Beach Chalet. The rest of the afternoon would be spent at the Tiled Steps and Mount Davidson, popular among the locals but unknown to most tourists.
The day following that would be hiking among the labyrinth of trails at Land’s End and along Ocean Beach. Followed by even more cold refreshing adult beverages at the many welcoming pubs in the Richmond and Sunset Districts.
I could go on and on, but in the interest of time, suffice it to say that one doesn’t have to venture too far from home to find one’s favorite destinations.”
Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We’ll be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.
Tell us
It’s been a wild winter in California. Snow in Silicon Valley. Record-breaking flooding along the Central Coast. Graupel on the Hollywood sign.
Send us your photos and stories of what these past few months of unusual weather have been like in your corner of California. Email us at CAtoday@nytimes.com.
And before you go, some good news
In The New York Times Magazine, the writer Rosecrans Baldwin makes the case for Los Angeles as a walking city.
He chronicles a stroll down a strip of Rosecrans Avenue, a 27-mile street that stretches from South Los Angeles to Fullerton and that’s named after one of his ancestors, William Starke Rosecrans, a Union general in the Civil War who later became a Los Angeles congressman. Baldwin writes:
“A 90-minute ramble revealed L.A.’s familiar extremes: big houses alongside dingbats, the shock of the unexpected coinciding with numbing dullness. But I also saw small green parks, southern views of the basin and an older-women’s jogging group all wearing sun hats that looked like huge black shells. I finished at Rosecrans’s eastern terminus and got a burrito. There was a feeling I’ve experienced only in Los Angeles: I was in the middle of nowhere and at the center of everything, all at once.”
