Runoff from a Dec. 21, 2025, storm floods Cathy and Ernie Borgel’s property on Wilshire Drive in Redding. The flash flood that day overwhelmed the nearby Henderson Ditch and inundated nearby property. (Photo by Cathy Borgel)
The Borgels say they’re among seven homeowners in the Rother Riverside neighborhood who suffered nearly $700,000 in overall damage.
The flash flooding was so severe in parts of the city that walls of sandbags wouldn’t have held it back.
That day a 74-year-old Redding man died after rising floodwaters elsewhere in south Redding trapped him inside his vehicle. A police officer swam to the rescue to pull him out, but the man didn’t survive.
Redding made the national news with TV networks and newspapers, including The New York Times, reporting on the deluge and death.
Wilshire Drive residents Ernie and Cathy Borgel, who are among those pushing for a ditch fix, were interviewed by a FOX Weather channel host in the wake of the atmospheric river.
One of Cathy and Ernie Borgel’s shops flooded on Dec. 21, 2025, after their home and property were flooded with runoff that the Henderson Ditch couldn’t handle. The 1972 Chevrolet Rally Nova that Ernie was restoring suffered damage as water rose to the seats and carpet. (Photo by Cathy Borgel)
In one video clip, you can see the Borgels’ Christmas tree sideways in the water with its lights still flashing inside their darkened home. The fast-rising torrent filled their shops with more than 3 feet of water and took its toll on a classic car Ernie was restoring.
The next day the couple spent $1,000 on huge fans to start drying out their home. They’re still working to install new flooring and repair other damage.
What makes the Borgels’s situation all the more exasperating is they don’t even live next to the ditch. They live several blocks away from where a gaping hole still hasn’t been fixed.
“None of the water (in the ditch) comes from our neighborhood,” Cathy Borgel recently told the Board of Supervisors during public comments.
The couple didn’t have flood insurance for the home they’ve lived in for nearly 15 years because Cathy Borgel said they weren’t required to.
After the floodwaters receded, Borgel said she called the National Flood Insurance Program after one insurer declined to write a policy.
“The national flood guy is like, ‘You will not get any private insurer to insure you after what happened,’” she said.
Borgel said she filed legal claims against the city in hopes of getting reimbursed for the damage, but the claims were denied.
Passing the buck?
It wasn’t until recently that residents got the attention of Redding officials, who sent a city heavy-equipment crew and hired Cal Fire to remove brush and trees.
A city of Redding excavator operator removes tree branches and brush that were cut down by a Cal Fire inmate crew from the Sugar Pine Conservation Camp on Oct. 27, 2026. The city of Redding contracted with Cal Fire to clear the Henderson Ditch for $500 a day the week of Oct. 27-30, 2026. (Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe)
In a letter to Henderson Ditch neighbors dated Oct. 22, 2026, the city said it went ahead with the work to protect public safety in anticipation of “severe storm and flood conditions.”
The city contracted for the one-time cleaning in the aftermath of Gov. Gavin Newsom declaring a state of emergency to prepare for El Niño. The council has approved a local declaration as well.
“The obstructed condition of the Henderson Ditch presents an imminent threat of flooding to surrounding persons and property,” the city stated in the letter.
The letter, though, emphasizes the city isn’t taking responsibility for ongoing or future maintenance of the ditch except for a section where a culvert crosses Henderson Road.
The city describes most of the ditch as privately owned, and encourages both neighbors and ditch owners to get together to come up with a regular maintenance plan.
The city says a title company review reveals the ditch is owned by the heirs of Henry and Irene Rother, who developed the subdivision in the 1940s.
Borgel has been researching documents at the county’s assessor’s office and is putting together a timeline of the ditch’s history.
Her research shows city and county officials oftentimes insist the ditch’s upkeep was not in their purview. Neighbors have been told it’s their responsibility to keep the ditch free flowing.
“The question no one will answer on the record: Who owns this ditch and why is it still broken,” Borgel told A News Cafe. “Nobody seems to know.”
Cutting through red tape
Homeowner Lance Starin stands at a corner of his lot where the Wilshire Lateral behind him converges with the Henderson Ditch to the left. Runoff from flash flooding in Redding on Dec. 21, 2025, swept across Starin’s property. (Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe)
Lance Starin, who lives down an embankment a stone’s throw from Hartnell Avenue, said his property was flooded last December when water overflowed from a small ditch called the Wilshire Lateral, which is supposed to serve as a catchment as it curves into the Henderson Ditch.
The ditch consists of culverts (with at least one leading to a sandbar), pipes and concrete-lined canals before the water flows west in between homes and dumps into the Sacramento River just south of the Nur Pon Open Space.
Starin said he, his wife and two helpers used shovels to frantically steer much of the floodwaters away from his home, but an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) got drenched and their laundry room flooded.
Starin thinks his cat got swept away in the water that rushed through his breezeway.
“I walked the entire length of this ditch to as close as I could get to the river, which was not as close as I’d hoped, looking for our, we think, drowned cat,” he said. “We never found her body.”
Lesson in collaboration
Land above Starin’s property historically has been home to groups of the unsheltered population. There’s still trash strewn around the area.
Starin wonders why the Henderson Ditch has remained such a problem over the years after he saw agency representatives get together to successfully figure out how to thin out homeless encampments near the canals.
“This land has been, over the years, filled in with mattresses, pallets and shopping carts – The usual detritus of folks camping there,” Starin said.
He tells the story about how he watched from his property last summer as reps from Redding police, the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office and others gathered on the ground to come up with a plan.
“One fine afternoon, all of those entities and probably a couple more that I didn’t know about or couldn’t recognize, stood on the other side of this fence and had a summit,” Starin said.
“Department of Public Works is talking to RPD, is talking to REU and PG&E, about what kind of access they need that resulted in trees getting cut,” Starin said.
“They did stuff, right? The point is those six or seven guys figured out a way to actually act on these waterways,” he said.
Starin thinks there’s an impasse among agencies because the ditch problem is a lot larger issue.
“That’s bureaucratic intransigence. Everybody’s pointing everywhere else. It’s just a thicket of fingers pointing away from themselves,” Starin said.
‘Pack up and go’
Ernie Borgel points to overgrown vegetation and trash in the Henderson Ditch where it crosses under Henderson Road on Oct. 23, 2026. Just over an inch of rain fell in Redding the day before. (Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe)
The December flooding wasn’t the first time that water breached the banks along the often overgrown and debris-strewn Henderson Ditch, which is downslope and just southwest of Hartnell Avenue and west of Bechelli Lane.
Borgel has uncovered county Public Works complaint forms dating back to September 1963 when residents asked to raise the banks and “beef up Henderson Ditch in the area that failed last winter.”
Her research showed that the ditch was cleaned by prisoners in October 1963.
The Henderson Ditch is pretty much out of sight and out of mind for most people. Motorists heading east on Hartnell Avenue toward the Bechelli Lane intersection can catch a glimpse of the ditch area if they look to the right.
Borgel said she and husband, Ernie, are preparing for wet winter and the threat of El Niño by improving the drainage around their home. He’s a contractor with expertise in drainage and grading, she said.
They already were battling a little flooding that day on Dec. 21 but they weren’t prepared what came next.
“About 2 o’clock in the afternoon, my husband goes in the backyard because he notices the pool is pretty full already,” she said.
“He goes out back and he comes in and he’s like, ‘Cath, something’s not right. There’s a lot of water in the backyard,” she said.
Ernie returned a short time later and said it was time to leave.
“He came in and said, ‘Babe, I’m staring God straight in the face. We need to pack up and go.’
“At that point it didn’t register. But then I looked out and this wave of water is coming toward our home – a wave of water coming from the corner of our lot toward our home and you can’t stop water,” Cathy Borgel said.
Their 90-pound dog had to swim to safety from the front porch as the water rose almost to the headlights of their Jeep in the driveway.
Afterward, the Borgels lived for three months in a borrowed camper in their driveway while they worked to make their home semi-livable again.
More runoff coming?
In studying the narrow Henderson Ditch, it’s obvious that it wasn’t built to reliably drain a surge of stormwater from an area that Cathy Borgel describes as some 275 acres of roads, pavement and parking lots, including two nearby schools.
“We receive water from as far away as the old Kmart (Cascade Station shopping area),” she said.
Borgel contends the ditch has the capability to only carry 35 percent of the flow from a 100-year flood.
Compounding Cathy Borgel’s fears is Caltrans’ planned upgrade to Interstate 5 in Redding where the agency intends to add new lanes for driver and truck-transportation safety.
“We are not listed in the environmental impact study,” she said.
Borgel worries that if the project creates any more runoff, it will tax the waterway even more. Already, she says, water from the ditch flows through several thousand feet of pipeline from I-5.
She plans to ask Caltrans to pause the Fix 5 project to consider its effect on the ditch.
Will new work save the day?
A city of Redding map outlines the Henderson Ditch in south Redding. Shaded areas are in the city limits and the lighter shade is land in Shasta County.
The prospect of coming face-to-face with another torrent of water has led a group of homeowners living on Wilshire Drive, Irene Way and John Street, among others, to appeal for emergency help before it’s too late.
They’ve gone before the Shasta County Board of Supervisors since their neighborhood is a pocket of county land surrounded by the city of Redding.
“We are county surrounded by urbanization and no one has ever done anything with this ditch since it was built,” Borgel said. “This used to be just a hay field.”
Wilshire Road resident Cathy Borgel holds up a drainage map before asking the Shasta County Board of Supervisors on Oct. 27, 2026, to put the Henderson Ditch and Wilshire Lateral issues on a future board agenda. She also asked the county to meet with Redding and Caltrans officials to sort out ownership of the ditch and where all the runoff originates. (Screenshot from Shasta County meeting video)
She has appeared before the county supervisors and City Council to bring attention to their neighborhood plight.
She said she’s also contacted every local news outlet she can think of, including A News Cafe, for coverage.
“I emailed all the news sites,” Borgel said. “We are starting to talk and we’re angry.”
The families have gotten more attention, so far, from Redding officials, who made a presentation to the City Council on Oct. 20.
The city announced at the meeting that it committed to pay $500 a day over four days so the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection could bring in a Sugar Pine Conservation Camp inmate crew for ditch clearing.
City officials say various work has been done over the years.
· The city contracted for ditch reconstruction and improvements in October 1986.
· CDF (now Cal Fire) performed maintenance work there in September 1996.
· Redding Electric Utility sent crews to clear brush and vegetation along its easement downstream of Henderson Road in the summer of 2019.
A view of the Henderson Ditch at Henderson Road on Oct. 29, 2026, after a Cal Fire inmate crew went through to remove trash and vegetation. (Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe)
Borgel found records from about five years ago that say the county brought in the California Conservation Corps for ditch work.
Assistant Director of Public Works Ryan Bailey said the city will keep up with maintenance where it has the right of way at the box culvert on Henderson Road and the concrete section just upstream.
Even with the work by inmate crews this October, there’s no guarantee removing brush and trash from the chokepoints will save the day this winter.
Borgel says residents are asking for a “real” engineered repair of the ditch and its open breaks – more than just a cleanup.
‘Please … clean it out’
Kevin Kewley, who lives on Birch Way, described to the City Council how frightened he and his wife were when the ditch overflowed in December.
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“My house was one that that river just came through. At the time, my pregnant wife and our 5-year-old had to evacuate,” he said. “It was really scary.”
He acknowledged there’s been a lot of finger-pointing over who has responsibility over ditch maintenance and that it’s been a 60-year-old problem.
“I’m just here to ask anybody who will listen to please clear out that ditch before the El Niño comes,” Kewley said. “At the end of the day, we don’t really care who owns it. We’re just like, please, somebody clean it out.”
He said he’s learned that the canal has overflowed at least seven times in the past 70 years.
“It’s not like a 100-year flood issue. It’s like a decade flood issue, and with El Niño being as bad as it’s looking, we just need some help,” he told the council.
Ditch difficulties
A concrete-lined stretch of the Henderson Ditch is shown looking east from Henderson Road on Oct. 29, 2026. The sign warns against dumping with the admonition: “The house you flood may be your own.” (Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe)
The Henderson Ditch fits the description of a neglected stepchild.
Bailey of the city’s Public Works Department described the ownership ambiguity when he gave a presentation to the council.
Bailey said the ditch is partially in the county and partially in the city.
He said when the Rother Riverside Subdivision was recorded with Shasta County in 1949, county supervisors accepted the roads but didn’t accept the drainage way. At the time, the subdivision’s owners agreed to maintain the drainage way for only two years.
Bailey said the city asked a title company to dig into the records and the research showed the ditch’s owners are the heirs of the Rother family who developed the subdivision.
A map with a satellite view shows the location of the Henderson Ditch in south Redding and where it empties into the Sacramento River south of the Nur Pon Open Space. (Courtesy of city of Redding)
“To be honest, we don’t know exactly who those persons are,” he said.
In 1981, the city annexed a portion of the Wilshire Drive area but left the county portion alone.
Bailey noted that water drains into the Henderson Ditch from both city and private property, including portions of Interstate 5 where Caltrans has rights-of-way.
“A lot of the statements I hear … since it drains the city of Redding, it’s the city’s responsibility. That is not necessarily the case. California drainage law states the owner of the property, it is their responsibility to move that water from above and to below,” he said.
A clouded history
Borgel, who’s collected a binder thick with more than 600 pages of documents, recently came across Board of Supervisors minutes from December 1968 where then-Public Works Director Richard Curry envisioned a storm drain maintenance district to pay for the ditch’s upkeep. The proposal was referred to the Local Agency Formation Commission.
Cathy Borgel walked from her neighborhood south of the Henderson Ditch to the Sacramento River on Oct. 29, 2026, to search for the end of the ditch and where it empties into the river. (Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe)
As far as Borgel could determine, the maintenance district didn’t go anywhere but she’s still doing research.
She’s also hoping to find out who exactly dug the ditch by examining records through the Shasta Historical Society.
“Nobody realizes that none of this water is ours,” she said.
Starin said he’s ambivalent about the ditch being cleaned out.
“I think it’s good that they are coming,” he said before crews arrived last Tuesday.
He considers the city’s action as the bare minimum response.
“I’m deeply concerned that they will use this activity as a springboard to claim that they have responded appropriately to a situation for which this is clearly a woefully inadequate response,” he said. “That is how I feel.”
Nowadays, the Borgels keep a close eye on the forecast. They even pay for a weather service that provides long-range predictions.
“I used to cry when I talked to people (about the ditch) but I’m out of tears,” she said.
She said it’s time for the city and county to come to the table, determine who owns each part of the ditch and “figure out what we’re going to do.”
“I’ve made it my mission to find out so the next generation doesn’t have to go through this bullshit,” she said.
City, county cooperation?
Residents who attended the City Council’s Oct. 20 meeting should’ve walked away feeling a little better.
In his council presentation, Bailey said the city will pursue solutions, including the possibility of resurrecting the idea of “some sort” of maintenance district that county officials previously brought up.
“It’s an idea that’s out there. … We will continue to research that,” he said.
“The city will continue to work with the county and the residents to determine the ownership of the ditch, maintenance responsibilities and future maintenance plans,” Bailey said.
Neighbors seem to have a supporter in council member Erin Resner, who beat Supervisor Kevin Crye in the June election and will take her seat on the Board of Supervisors come January.
She thanked city officials for hiring the Cal Fire crew as “a financially prudent solution for at least the time being. This does feel like a wise first step.”
“I’ve walked through that ditch and I’m aware that it is precarious, so thank you for cleaning it up,” she said at the October council session.
She told residents in the audience that night to continue their pressure on the county so it’ll work with the city.
“It will take everyone working together to find a long-term solution,” Resner said.
