The cleanup is complete, and the Kims will soon be back in business.

The Mobil station and convenience store they own at Date Palm Drive and Vista Chino in Cathedral City will soon be pumping gas and selling energy drinks, car washes and snacks—after being closed for almost eight months.

On Aug. 20, 2023, Tropical Storm Hilary wreaked havoc on the Panorama enclave in Cathedral City. A mud flow devastated the area, shuttering businesses and damaging homes for blocks.

The family-owned gas station, one of about 10 small businesses in the area, is the last to dig out of the devastation. Fifteen mounds of waist-high dirt are all that’s left of the wall of mud that crashed down during the storm.

Johnaten Kim runs the business that his parents started. They have a couple of gas stations in the Coachella Valley; his background is in finance, but Kim said he was raised in gas stations and has been learning the intricacies of the business since childhood. But neither Kim nor other nearby business owners could have possibly been prepared for the mud. Recovering from Hilary involved replacing everything down to the bones of the building, after shoveling through a four-foot crush of mud that left no corner untouched.

“We’re talking close to 200 tons of mud,” Kim said. “The structure remains the same; the footprint remains the same, but all the materials inside are brand-spanking new. It was about $800,000 worth of damage.”

Frazier Pest Control, nearby at 68920 Adelina Road, was in a unique position to avoid the worst of Storm Hilary: Joe Frazier’s drivers take their equipment with them. If his trucks had been stored at his facility where he works alongside his wife, son and a handful of customer service staffers, “We’d be out of business,” Frazier said. “Our guys take the trucks home. After it happened, it took, like, two days to just assess everything and figure out what the heck we were going to do.”

He bought laptops for his schedulers and set them up to work at home. Thanks to some quick thinking and a technology boost, they were back up and running within a week.

Still, Frazier Pest Control didn’t escape the wrath of Hilary. “Our building is 2,000 square feet, and there was three to four feet of mud completely (covering floors) inside the structure,” Frazier said. “It took two weeks and 30 to 40 people to wheelbarrow all the mud out.”

Somu Desai, owner of Desert Promotions, at 68915 Vista Chino, is still replacing, piece by piece, the machinery his company uses to create signs, screen-printing and custom embroidery. In January, he was able reopen his 8,200 square-foot facility after “working tirelessly” alongside friends and neighbors who helped remove three feet of mud.

He described the effects of Storm Hilary as worse than the effects of the COVID-19 shutdowns.

“We were at the epicenter of it,” Desai said. “Before the flood, we had a huge capacity. We did almost (all of our printing) and everything in-house. Once the storm happened, we lost a lot of our machinery. We had to take little steps. We were able to clean up the whole building, but we didn’t have any equipment, so we are replacing a few pieces at a time.”

Desai wanted to get his staff back to work as soon as possible. In six years at the Vista Chino location, they’d become like family. Some went on unemployment while others looked for part-time work—even as they continued to help at the store.

“Our staff was very instrumental in the cleanup,” Desai said. “They are just very faithful and wanted to help us out. We have so much invested in them; they’re so much a part of our team. And we didn’t want to lose any of them—you know?”

The Mobil station at Date Palm and Vista Chino should finally reopen soon. “We’re talking close to 200 tons of mud,” owner Johnaten Kim said. “The structure remains the same; the footprint remains the same, but all the materials inside are brand-spanking new. It was about $800,000 worth of damage.” Credit: Haleemon Anderson

Over at the Mobil station, Kim had to deal with unique challenges—because gasoline has a way of complicating a cleanup.

“You have environmentally hazardous material, gasoline, sitting under the ground,” Kim said. “There are still empty spaces in there just flush with water. While the (underground storage tank) itself remained perfectly fine—it did its job—the space around it, you have to recover it, wash it off, clean it and test it.”

Since the gas station was closed, Kim decided to take the opportunity to do a full renovation.

“You think, ‘OK, a 30-year-old building gets wiped out by a hurricane. Let’s use this moment to springboard it up, change the dynamic of the property and rebuild it to a more modern spec,’” Kim said.

Even with flood insurance, business owners had to come up with a lot of money out-of-pocket to get back up and running. Frazier estimates insurance paid about 30 percent of the total needed to replace everything. It covered damage to the structure—but nothing inside the building. The mud damage was so horrific, it made salvaging impossible.

“We had everything torn out, all the way to the studs,” Frazier said.

A low point came for Frazier in November, when federal disaster relief was finally approved for the parts of California hit by Hilary. It provided Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance to “state, tribal and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations.”

“But nothing for the businesses or the residents—and I just lost it,” Frazier said. “They said it wasn’t a big enough disaster for them to help.”

Frazier is right: Individual assistance—the kind that follows a disaster on the level of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the recent Maui wildfires, and puts FEMA agents on the ground providing public assistance to individual households and business owners—was not included.

Affected businesses and nonprofit organizations throughout Riverside County are eligible for loans of up to $2 million to repair or replace damaged assets, and home owners are eligible for loans of up to $500,000 to repair or replace real estate, and $100,000 to replace or repair personal property. A Small Business Administration outreach center at the Cathedral City Library helped get those initial applications processed quickly, and the loans are still available until a June 24 deadline. However, while the loans are low-interest, they’re still loans and need to be repaid.

While some businesses owners and homeowners affected by the mud flow expressed anger at Cathedral City for a lack of action, Anne Ambrose, the city’s assistant city manager, explained that the city has no control over the federal government’s disaster designation or response.

“It starts at the local level,” said Ambrose. “As a city, we declare a local disaster, because the incident is larger than what we can (handle) with our local resources. The counties declare a disaster and then roll it up to the state. … So even though we had a small area that had a significant amount of damages, in our community, it wasn’t significant enough to trigger the federal government” to provide relief to businesses beyond low-interest loans.

Cathedral City is working with FEMA to recover the costs the city incurred for emergency-relief efforts.

“The city did what it could in terms of removing the debris from the public areas,” said Ambrose. “To this date, we’ve spent over $6 million on our public infrastructure and debris removal that we’re currently working through the process with FEMA to try and recover.”

She said the city recognizes there are community members who felt local governments should have done more.

“We know there are individuals who would like to have seen the local agency do more, but local cities are not in that position,” she said. “We’re not like the federal government, which is set up for that kind of assistance.”

Determining the responsible agent in an event that spreads over miles is also a complicating factor.

“If you look at what impacted Cathedral City, the mud flow that came into our city started 25 miles away, up in the hills,” Ambrose said. “That mud and debris flowed down and blocked channels, which was a major portion of the damage in the Panorama neighborhood around Horizon, and the businesses over there. They got the brunt of the mud flow that came into the city.”

Tropical Storm Hilary dropped about three inches of rain in the Coachella Valley, where we typically get about five inches of precipitation in the entire year. However, the mountains surrounding the valley were deluged: Mount San Jacinto, for example, got almost 12 inches of rain—and some of that water from the mountains came rushing down into the valley.

Ambrose said officials have described Hilary as a 1,000-year storm. “A 1,000-year flood event or a 1,000-year storm is a really significant event. That probably would have exceeded any mitigation effort in place,” Ambrose said.

The Coachella Valley Water District and the Riverside County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, the agencies that are responsible for flood control, have met with Cathedral City’s City Council to discuss potential mitigation efforts to lessen the impact of severe weather events in the future, including projects that are already funded or under way.

For Frazier, returning to pre-disaster norms meant taking out a loan from the SBA.

“It’s going to cost me $2,000 a month for 15 years to pay that,” he said.

Frazier said the family considered calling it quits.

“Everything that my wife has done to get this company back up and running, it’s been a strain on our marriage; it’s been a strain on the family,” Frazier said. “It’s been a strain on the employees. I had two quit because they were tired of working out of their house. I get upset talking about it.”

While government assistance was lacking, the affected businesses all expressed gratitude for the community’s support.

Area real estate agents raised more than $14,000 to assist Frazier Pest Control. Greater Palm Springs Realtors got the national Realtors Relief Foundation involved, offering up to $2,500 in assistance to affected citizens.

Loyalty to his customers kept Frazier motivated. After 37 years in pest control, he said he’s amassed more than 3,000 clients, with 600 real estate agents, who depend on Frazier Pest Control.

“We have a huge name in this valley. We couldn’t do that (give up),” he said.

The customer area at Desert Promotions after the mud flow.

The customer area at Desert Promotions today. Owner Somu Desai was able to re-open in January after “working tirelessly” alongside friends and neighbors who helped remove three feet of mud. Credit: Haleemon Anderson

Desai said community support went a long way toward getting Desert Promotions back in business. Donations poured in, and local businesses came forward to help. Ace Hardware in Palm Springs donated shovels; Renova Solar and Teserra Outdoors helped with the cleanup. Aspen Mills Bakery donated food for almost a month, Desai said.

“We were fortunate enough to have a lot of support from our customers, friends and family,” he said. “They set up a GoFundMe page (which raised more than $32,000), and we had local businesses that donated furniture, time and food. There were a couple of big donations from a couple of our customers, you know, which was very helpful.”

Desai said representatives from Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen stopped by a few times to serve food to the workers.

“I can only name so many (people who helped),” he said. “I don’t want to leave anyone out, but honestly, strangers we don’t even know came out to help us.”

Ambrose has worked in local government for almost 26 years. She said she’s worked in other disasters, but what she observed in Cathedral City was different.

“The community just came out in force to help (these) very small geographic areas of our community that were impacted so dramatically,” she said.

The city developed a list of more than 200 individuals or businesses that volunteered aid and assistance, according to Ambrose.

“There has been such a great response from the private sector, public sector, nonprofit and individuals that I thought was just very special, and I’d not experienced to the extent that I did here and throughout the Coachella Valley,” she said.

Johnaten Kim hopes Cathedral City is preparing for the next disaster. Weather conditions can’t be controlled, but he hopes there is a plan going forward to put more mitigation measures into effect.

“No one wants something like this to happen again,” said Kim.

He said he hopes city planners will use federal money for infrastructure projects.

“Even though we are in the desert, there should have been some type of mitigation,” he said. “We’re still getting storms. This past year, we’ve had a good four, five seasonal storms where we’re getting all this water that’s carrying mud from west of our property. Every time it rains here, it brings a flood of sand onto the property, because this is the low level, acting as a basin. We can tell the city, ‘Hey, build a culvert here to prevent this in the future.’ They need to do something infrastructurally to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Haleemon Anderson is a California Local News Fellow. She can be reached at handerson@cvindependent.com.

After the Wall of Mud: Tropical Storm Hilary Devastated Businesses in a Corner of Cathedral City—and Some of Them Are Just Now Reopening is a story from Coachella Valley Independent, the Coachella Valley's alternative news source.