Gavin Newsom and San Jose leave California to drown in storms

By Imani Sutton · Reporting from Atlanta · October 18, 2026

As a historic El Niño brings record storms and heat to California, state and local leaders cut climate programs and rely on manual floodgates.

The heat before the flood

The forecast calls for a super El Niño. Governor Gavin Newsom spent his emergency declaration trimming the very wires holding the state together. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, classrooms in Santa Barbara topped 100 degrees. Then Newsom shut down the school HVAC funding program entirely. He also gutted the Demand Side Grid Support Program. The program lets households send power from home batteries back to the grid. That virtual power plant provides as much energy as a gas plant. This is the 1997-1998 El Niño all over again. Extreme weather events are driven by Pacific Ocean warming, exposing the failure of aging infrastructure and the systemic underfunding of disaster mitigation.

Newsom pressures investor-owned utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric Company during bankruptcies. He called for a consensual resolution citing corporate mismanagement, yet he leaves residential ratepayers to sweat through classrooms and high utility bills. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy handed PG&E a $15 billion low-interest loan to modernize hydroelectric assets. The state bails out the corporation that burns down our counties while ripping the battery support right out of our living rooms. When the grid buckles under the next heat wave, the bill goes to the homeowner who bought solar panels with their own savings.

The manual labor of municipal panic

Down in San Jose, tech entrepreneur turned Mayor Matt Mahan is trying to dashboard his way through a climate crisis with Silicon Valley donor backing. The Mercury News reports that San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley Water District held a joint session to prepare for storms. They boasted an 11,000-square-foot Emergency Operations Center on Senter Road. But a shiny room does not turn a crank. Resident Eric Heckman pointed out a floodwall behind his property along Coyote Creek. It requires two trained personnel to manually crank shut a steel gate the width of a garage. "There is no number near the wall to say 'here's who to call.' There's no cameras that are watching it," Heckman said.

Mahan’s primary answer to approaching atmospheric rivers is not structural engineering or affordable housing. Instead, the city has cleared and maintained 26 miles of waterway buffer zones. That continues a pattern of moving unhoused residents out of waterways. South Bay homeless advocate Gail Osmer noted after the city's emergency presentation that she did not hear a single word about unhoused people living along those creeks. The Coyote Mudlarks, a volunteer group led by Mark Schroeder, presented a petition documenting nine major wood blockages along Coyote Creek. The city can map streams and enforce encampment-free zones. Yet it cannot guarantee that workers will reach a garage-wide steel gate in the dark when the water rises.

The federal safety net is missing

San Diego is projected to receive 263 percent of its normal rainfall. ABC7 Bay Area reports that Southern California reservoirs are near capacity. Former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo warned that municipalities bracing for these storms face reduced federal disaster support. Liccardo cited more than 4,300 job cuts at FEMA alongside stripped funding for NOAA weather forecasting and early warning alerts.

The opposition will argue that local agencies are cooperating across jurisdictional lines, pointing to Mayor Mahan and the water district mapping hotspots together. They cite flood protection upgrades for Manteca-Lathrop-Weston Ranch funded by a parcel tax. As the Manteca Bulletin notes, that project is not expected to be in place until approximately 2032. That leaves communities exposed for years of atmospheric rivers. You cannot tax parcels to fix a levee that breaks. When the levees break along the Stanislaus and San Joaquin rivers, a PowerPoint presentation from the Office of Emergency Management will not keep the water out of the living room.

Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Matt Mahan can declare all the states of emergency they want, but they are managing a climate collapse with administrative theater. When the rain starts, the state cuts the grid support and the city sweeps the unhoused people out of the creek beds. The bill goes to the residential ratepayers. Residents can petition the city and demand structural flood protection before the water rises.

Gavin Newsom and San Jose leave California to drown in storms

The heat before the flood

The manual labor of municipal panic

The federal safety net is missing

Sources