Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [120]
During the initial construction, the road was all but closed to through traffic. The amount of cars going past the base was down to hundreds instead of tens of thousands. It looked like the plan was going to work. People had already started taking the alternate route; so much so that we had heard that the Ramona Expressway was starting to back up at rush hour. This had never happened before and was a good sign that the traffic was being successfully redirected.
After two years of construction, the road and tunnels were completed. It was one of the nicest roads in Hemet or San Jacinto. To keep the road noise down, the asphalt was made very smooth. New road lines were painted in and turnouts were made for all four security gates. The tunnels meant no more waiting for cars to be able to cross the road and no more pedestrian gates that allowed staff to leave when they wanted to.
It appeared that Dave’s little plan had been successful. But a few short months later his plan would be foiled as it always was. A fairly large rainstorm had hit the area, and when I say the area, I do not mean Riverside, or Hemet or San Jacinto. No, I mean Gilman Hot Springs.
This was not like the August 1990 flood. That was a lot of water in a very short amount of time, maybe an hour or two. This storm went on for days. And while it was raining in San Jacinto, it was simply pouring down in Gilman Hot Springs. It was unnatural.
There was a lot of worry about the new tunnels and the new road. Would the storm undermine their integrity and cause them to collapse? Would the mountain slide down onto the new road? None of those things would happen. But what did happen would be worse.
Just like in the 1990 flood, the river that ran along the south side of the property ran high and threatened to break the levees which ran the entire distance of the property.
Teams of people were assigned to run dozers and backhoes to shore up the levee, no matter the cost. Several of us were “rovers”. We were given walkie-talkies and rode our motorcycles around the property line assessing the damage and reporting back to “Station One” the status of the water line and any levee breaks.
After three days of being up all night and day riding my motorcycle around in the freezing rain, I could not do it any longer. I was sick, very sick. I had to go to isolation. When I got there, it was packed with other staff, most of who had been on the same rover duty as me. I slept for two days and when I awoke, I heard one of the craziest things I had heard in ages.
After the San Jacinto River went past our property, it went under Sanderson Street. Well it had gone over Sanderson Street and taken it down river. It was no longer there. I did not believe it and rode my bike down the road to see for myself.
Sure enough. The road was GONE. The asphalt literally dead-ended and there was now a twenty-foot drop where the road used to be. For someone from anywhere else in the US, this might have been a periodic occurrence. Not here in Riverside County. We got a few inches of rain the entire year! For a major road to be washed away was a big deal.
One of the older security guards who had been at the base forever told me that this road had been damaged many years back by a similar flood in 1980. It was at that exact moment that I realized why the city had fast tracked the road. They knew that their road was going to get killed at some point and without fixing up the road that went through the property, the trip into town or the casinos would be threatened.
Sure enough, as soon as Sanderson was gone, the traffic through the base was not only back up to previous levels, but it was now all traffic—heavy trucks, semi-trucks, cars—everything had to go through the property.
To add insult to injury, the turn outs were somehow confusing and people were using them as passing lanes! So people would be driving down the two lane highway road, and when they got to the property, they would gun it to pass other cars as the road would widen to four lanes!
To say Dave Miscavige was pissed was an understatement.