13 DEAD IN MUDSLIDES
POSH CALIFORNIA ENCLAVE INUNDATED AS WILDFIRE-RACKED HILLSIDES COLLAPSE IN HEAVY RAINS
At least 13 people were killed and homes were torn from their foundations Tuesday as downpours sent mud and boulders roaring down hills stripped of vegetation by a gigantic wildfire that raged in Southern California last month.
Rescue crews used helicopters to pluck people from rooftops because debris blocked roads, and firefighters pulled a mud-caked 14-year-old girl from a collapsed Montecito home where she had been trapped for hours.
“I thought I was dead for a minute there,” the girl could be heard saying on video posted by KNBC-TV before she was taken away on a stretcher.
All 13 deaths were believed to have occurred in Montecito, a wealthy enclave of about 9,000 people northwest of Los Angeles that is home to such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Rob Lowe and Ellen DeGeneres, said Santa Barbara County spokesman David Villalobos.
The mud was unleashed in the dead of night by flash flooding in the steep, fire-scarred Santa Ynez Mountains. Burned-over zones are especially susceptible to destructive mudslides because scorched earth doesn’t absorb water well and the land is easily eroded when there are no shrubs.
The torrent of mud early Tuesday swept away cars and destroyed several homes, reducing them to piles of lumber. Photos posted on social media showed waist-deep mud in living rooms.
Some residents were unaccounted for in neighbourhoods hard to reach because of downed trees and power lines, Santa Barbara County Fire Department spokesman Dave Zaniboni said.
“I came around the house and heard a deep rumbling, an ominous sound I knew was ... boulders moving as the mud was rising,” said Thomas Tighe, who discovered two of his cars missing from the driveway. “I saw two other vehicles moving slowly sideways down the middle of the street in a river of mud.”
Authorities had been bracing for the possibility of catastrophic flooding because of heavy rain in the forecast for the first time in 10 months.
Evacuations were ordered beneath recently burned areas of Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
But only an estimated 10 to 15 per cent of people in a mandatory evacuation area of Santa Barbara County heeded the warning, authorities said.
Marshall Miller, who evacuated his home in Montecito on Monday with his family, returned to find his neighbourhood devastated. He never reached his home because two of his neighbours, an elderly woman and her daughter, needed a lift to the hospital after being rescued.
The pair had left their house before it was inundated with six feet of mud, but they got trapped outside in the deep muck. “It was sobering,” Miller said. “I saw them covered in mud and shaking from the cold.”
The path of the torrent was graphically illustrated on the side of a white colonial-style house, where a dark grey stain created a wavy pattern halfway up the front windows.
Cars were washed off roads, and one was deposited upside down in a tangle of tree limbs. A stretch of U.S. Highway 101 that connects Ventura County to Santa Barbara County looked like a muddy river clogged with trees and other debris. A kayak was marooned in the flotsam, and a Range Rover was buried up to its bumpers.
Some of the worst damage was on Montecito’s Hot Springs Road, where 14-year old Lauren Cantin was rescued after firefighters heard her muffled screams.
Rescue workers spent six hours digging Cantin out of her house, which was destroyed by mud and floodwaters.
“To be able to have her come out safely and as unscathed as she was, it was pretty phenomenal,” Andy Rupp, a Montecito Fire Protection District firefighter, told NBC News.
The worst of the rainfall occurred in a 15-minute span starting at 3:30 a.m. Montecito got more than a half-inch in five minutes, while Carpinteria received nearly an inch in 15 minutes.
“All hell broke loose,” said Peter Hartmann, a dentist who moonlights as a news photographer for the local website Noozhawk.
The communities are beneath the scar left by a wildfire that erupted Dec. 4 and became the largest ever recorded in California. It spread over more than 41,140 square kilometres and destroyed 1,063 homes and other structures.