We reviewed the city’s El Niño page like a product
San Diego is heading into what NOAA says has a better than 90 percent chance of being a very strong El Niño. The city has one page for it. We graded that page the way you would grade a smoke alarm.
How we judged it
This is a hazard awareness page, not the city’s emergency management portal, and it would be unfair to grade it as if it were the whole system. So we asked the three questions we would ask of any safety product.
- Does it work when you actually need it?
- Does it work for everyone, or only for people who own the building?
- Does the maker stand behind it?
The report card
| Attribute | Rating |
|---|---|
| Language access | Excellent |
| Clarity of instructions | Very Good |
| Ease of navigation | Good |
| Local specificity | Fair |
| Up-to-date information | Poor |
| Coverage of users | Poor |
| Usefulness during a storm | Poor |
| Recovery guidance | Poor |
| Predicted reliability | Poor |
What it gets right
- Flyers in ten languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, English, Farsi, Korean, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese. Few cities ship anything close.
- A property checklist broken into seven named parts (slopes, bare ground, drains and gutters, structures, vegetation, roofs, sandbags). It is better written than most municipal hazard pages.
- It states plainly that most homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. That is the most valuable sentence on the page.
- Sandbag sites listed by council district, with links to each recreation center.
- Emergency alerting is pushed hard, which is the correct priority.
Low No. 1: no expiration date
The page is built entirely on a forecast. It carries no date stamp and no “last updated” field anywhere. Its only temporal claim is that the National Weather Service predicts intensification “during the fall and winter of 2026 and 2027.”
El Niño Advisory in effect. Sea surface temperature anomalies now exceed +2.0°C in the eastern equatorial Pacific.
Greater than 90 percent chance of a very strong event through Northern Hemisphere fall and winter 2026 to 2027, and a 69 percent chance of an event exceeding +2.5°C from October through December, which would surpass every El Niño since 1950.
Perishable safety information with no date on it is an unlabeled expiration.
Low No. 2: built for one kind of household
Inspect your slopes. Check your seawall and bulkhead. Trim your vegetation. Buy flood insurance. Every instruction assumes you own the building and can pay to modify it.
There is nothing for renters, who cannot inspect anyone’s roof. Nothing on what landlords owe tenants. Nothing for people with disabilities or with medical equipment that depends on power. Nothing for pets. Nothing for small businesses.
And nothing at all for unsheltered residents, who live in the riverbeds and canyons that this rain fills first.
Low No. 3: it stops working when the storm starts
- No shelters and no warming centers. The page links cooling centers instead, which is the wrong season.
- No evacuation routes and no assembly points.
- No phone number anywhere on the page. The city’s flood dispatch line, 619-527-7500, sits on the separate storm preparedness page.
- No recovery content. Nothing on documenting damage, filing claims, or what to do once water is in the house.
Strip out the sandbag list and the gutter advice and most of what remains is links to ready.gov, FEMA, NOAA and weather.com. That means the city’s page breaks whenever a partner agency redesigns a URL.
Ten bags per household or business, from 11 recreation centers. The companion page specifies that the bags are empty. Ten filled bags is roughly one doorway, not a house.
Predicted reliability: poor
We rate reliability on the performance of the system behind the product, not on the page itself.
On January 22, 2024, San Diego flooded catastrophically. The litigation that followed centers on the city’s own drainage maintenance, not on residents’ gutters. The city has faced a mass tort claim, settled a $6.3 million insurance matter that did not go to survivors, and countersued some flood victims.
Southcrest, among the neighborhoods hit hardest, appears on this page as a sandbag pickup site.
The forecast is potentially historic, the city’s own record is contested, and nearly every action the page asks for is one you perform on your own property at your own expense.
Features we would like to see
- A visible “last updated” date tied to the current NOAA advisory.
- A renter section, and what landlords are required to do.
- Access and functional needs guidance, including power-dependent medical equipment.
- Winter shelter and warming locations, with hours.
- Pets.
- A during-storm status view rather than a static page.
- What the city itself is doing to its channels and drains this season, with numbers.
Bottom line
Judged as an awareness flyer, this is competent work, and the translation effort deserves real credit. Judged as the resource a San Diegan opens in a strong El Niño winter, it is incomplete in the ways that matter most to the people with the least.
Use it for the property checklist and the insurance warning. Get everything else somewhere else.
Sources
- City of San Diego. (n.d.). El Niño in San Diego. sandiego.gov/elnino
- City of San Diego. (n.d.). Storm preparedness. sandiego.gov/storm-preparedness
- NOAA Climate Prediction Center. (2026, August 13). ENSO diagnostic discussion. cpc.ncep.noaa.gov
- inewsource. (2024, May 7). Flood victims file $100 million suit against city of San Diego. inewsource.org
- KPBS. (2025, May 27). City of San Diego files countersuit against some Jan. 22 flood victims. kpbs.org
- NBC 7 San Diego. (n.d.). San Diego to pay $6.3M settlement over 2024 floods, but not to survivors. nbcsandiego.com