Two governments. Two El Niño pages. Neither one tells you where to go.
The City of San Diego and the County of San Diego each published an El Niño page. Each has what the other is missing. Neither links to the other. We put them side by side and counted.
Nine attributes, both pages, same words: Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor. The conversion, published here so anyone can redo the arithmetic: Excellent 10, Very Good 8, Good 6, Fair 4, Poor 2, out of 90, scaled to 100.
The correction. In No. 01 we gave the city’s page 52 of 100. Under the conversion we are now publishing, the city’s nine ratings come to 42. The ratings themselves have not changed. The number did, because we are now showing the arithmetic instead of keeping it in our heads. 42 is the figure to use.
We tested every link on both pages on September 28, 2026, and requested the Spanish version of each directly.
Attribute by attribute
| Attribute | City | County | Better |
|---|---|---|---|
| Language access | Excellent | Poor | City |
| Clarity of instructions | Very Good | Good | City |
| Ease of navigation | Good | Very Good | County |
| Local specificity | Fair | Fair | Tie |
| Up-to-date information | Poor | Fair | County |
| Coverage of users | Poor | Poor | Tie |
| Usefulness during a storm | Poor | Good | County |
| Recovery guidance | Poor | Fair | County |
| Predicted reliability | Poor | Fair | County |
Twenty things a person would look for
| Looking for | City | County | Has it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Page itself available in Spanish | No | No | Neither |
| Translated materials | 10 languages | None found | City |
| Live rainfall and stream gauges | No | Yes | County |
| Hazard mapping tool | FEMA link | Know Your Hazards | County |
| Power outage map | No | Yes | County |
| Road closures | Yes | No | City |
| Sandbag locations | 10 sites, addresses | ~40 stations | Tie |
| Emergency alert sign-up | Yes | Yes | Tie |
| Renter rights | Yes | No | City |
| Business guidance | Yes | No | City |
| “After the storm” section | No | Yes | County |
| Names its own capacity | No | Yes | County |
| Shelter locations | No | No | Neither |
| Evacuation zones or routes | No | No | Neither |
| Replacing lost documents | Not linked | No | Neither |
| Local Assistance Center | No | No | Neither |
| People without a car | No | No | Neither |
| Unsheltered residents | No | No | Neither |
| Last-updated date | No | No | Neither |
| Links to the other one’s page | No | No | Neither |
What the table shows
Each page has what the other is missing
The city has ten languages of flyers and no live data. The county has live data and no Spanish. The city tells renters their rights. The county tells you the creek is rising. The city lists road closures. The county lists its own staffing.
Put them together and you have a decent page. They are not together. Neither one links to the other. The city won 4 of the twenty, the county won 5.
And both fail the same five things
Where to sleep. How to leave. How to get your papers back. What to do with no car. What to do with no home to begin with.
Every one of those was a documented failure in January 2024. Every one is absent from both pages in September 2026.
Neither page exists in Spanish
The city’s page offers flyers in Arabic, Chinese, Dari, English, Farsi, Korean, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese. The page itself is English only.
The county’s hub is worse. It has no translated materials at all, and the Spanish version of the page returns a 404. We checked twice, on September 24 and September 28. The county’s Spanish site works. It just has no El Niño page on it.
“The Emergency Operations Plan also did not account for communicating with residents in languages other than English, resulting in flyers containing translation errors or inaccurate information.” City of San Diego, Office of the City Auditor, Performance Audit of the City’s Disaster Response, June 2025, Finding 2.
The same audit found that the flooded neighborhoods have a higher share of households with no internet access and a higher share with limited English proficiency than the city average. The people least able to read the page in English are also the least likely to reach it at all.
The city already built the answer and did not connect it
After the 2024 flood the city stood up a page at sandiego.gov/recovery/documents telling people how to replace a lost ID, birth certificate, DMV record, passport, Social Security card and tax return.
It is still live today. It is not linked from the city’s El Niño page. The work exists. It is one hyperlink away from the people who will need it, and nobody has drawn the line.
Two pages is the 2024 architecture, republished
In January 2024 the city and county spent the first week deciding whose job the assistance center was. On January 31, the county’s interim chief administrative officer wrote to the city:
“Historically, the City has led within its jurisdiction by standing up its own local assistance centers.” County of San Diego letter to the City of San Diego, obtained and reported by Voice of San Diego, March 11, 2024.
- Day 6County opens an assistance center at Spring Valley Library, about ten miles from the worst damage.
- Day 8San Diego Foundation makes its first grants, before any government center is open inside city limits.
- Day 12City opens its own center at Mountain View Community Center.
- Day 28Federal individual assistance becomes available.
- Day 128The joint city and county housing assistance program opens applications.
A family on Beta Street does not know whether they are a city problem or a county problem. Two separate El Niño hubs, launched a week apart, neither linking to the other, is that same question handed back to the resident to answer.
Three fixes that cost almost nothing
- Publish both pages in Spanish.The county’s Spanish site already exists. The city already paid for translation into ten languages.
- Link the two pages to each other, and link both to the city’s lost documents page.Three hyperlinks.
- Put a last-updated date on both.People will reload these at two in the morning in January.
None of that requires a budget item, a council vote, or a storm.
The grade
City 42. County 44. Neither page is bad. The region published two halves and called it preparation.
Sources
- City of San Diego. El Niño in San Diego. Read September 28, 2026.
- County of San Diego. El Niño 2026: What San Diego County residents need to know. Read September 28, 2026.
- City of San Diego. Lost documents.
- San Diego County News Center. (2026, September 25). County launches El Niño 2026 information hub.
- Office of the City Auditor, City of San Diego. (2025, June). Performance audit of the City’s disaster response (OCA-25-10).
- Voice of San Diego. (2024, March 11). As city and county officials were mired in confusion, local nonprofits led the flood relief response.
- Hagerty Consulting, Inc. (2024, November 8). County of San Diego severe storm and flooding (DR-4758-CA) after action report.
- San Diego Housing Commission. (2025, August). Flood Recovery Program for Displaced Residents closeout report.