SLO County couple reopened salon after COVID closure. Then the storm flooded their home
For Ingrid and Andrew Turrey, owners of Pacific Hair Salon in Cambria for 35 years, the last week of January was an intense time.
On Monday, they got the word that they could reopen their salon after two months due to the lifting of a regional stay-at-home order designed to stem the rising tide of COVID-19 cases.
The Turreys went to work on Tuesday morning.
Then, at about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, they were “lying in bed, listening to the rain and the wind,” in their Lodge Hill home, “when suddenly, it was like a train came through the house,” Ingrid Turrey said.
“Andrew said the wind had lifted the edge of the roof,” Ingrid Turrey recalled Friday. “Suddenly, it was raining just as hard inside as it was outside.”
The couple went into crisis mode as water flooded their upstairs bedroom. They quickly donned raincoats, Ingrid Turrey said, then “used every towel possible. Every bucket. We grabbed Tupperware, then started using salad bowls.”
“It was insane,” the exhausted woman recalled, “because the water was coming in so fast. We’d dump things out, and they’d fill up as soon as we got them back in place.”
Turrey ran downstairs to get more containers, “and it was raining just as hard downstairs,” she said. “The leather couch was soaked. Everything was soaked. I was bucketing downstairs, and Andrew was bucketing upstairs. It was a total exercise in futility.”
Even in the middle of the night, however, “people were so cool,” Ingrid Turrey said.
“I sent an email to my insurance company at 4:30 a.m.,” she said, “and he’d called me back by 5:30. Central Coast Restoration was here by 8:30.”
As of Friday morning, the roof of the Turreys’ house was tarped with plastic, which slowed the water flow. “But it’s still seeping,” she said.
Turrey estimated that the continuing flow is probably from the soaked roof, drenched drywall and everything else that got drenched in the storm, a three-day deluge that has dumped as much as 17 inches of rain on the North Coast.
“We probably had 9 inches of rain inside the house,” Turrey quipped.
After dealing with the flooding, she said, she had to call all the customers “who finally had appointments after waiting for two months to get their hair done, and tell them that we’d have to close for a couple of days to get our living situation figured out.”
Once again, Turrey was blown away by people’s understanding and kindness.
“Everybody was super nice, understanding and sweet,” she said. “Two people brought us dinners.”
“Everybody’s always so great here, especially when something like this happens,” Turrey said.
The Turreys will also need a new place to live as they begin the long-haul task of putting their house in order.
Their storage pod won’t arrive until Feb. 5, the first date available, so they’ll probably order a Dumpster to use until then.
As soon as the insurance inspector arrives, Andrew Turrey, a former contractor, will begin tearing out some of the sopping drywall, carpeting and other ruined components of the house, trying to forestall mildew and other nasty flooding aftereffects.
They’ll hire a contractor to do the repairs, Ingrid Turrey said, because they have the salon to run. They reopened Pacific Hair Salon on Friday.
“We were closed six months out of last year,” she added with a laugh. “This couldn’t have happened then, or earlier this year, when we had nothing to do?”
This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 12:34 PM.
