Errors led to mudslides being deadly

UNITED STATES: When the final mandatory evacuation order lifted after mudslides struck the coastal hillside neighbourhood of Montecito, Dina Landi returned to her home this week anticipating the damage she might find.

Three weeks earlier, she and her partner had fled to a friend’s guesthouse, assuming that the voluntary evacuation zone would be safer.

But in the early morning hours of January 9, after they opened the door to check out the rainstorm raging outside, the structure flooded a metre deep in seconds, Landi said, forcing the couple to climb onto the guesthouse roof.

In the main house, their friend Rebecca Riskin and her husband had been swept away by the mudflow, killing Riskin.

It seemed inevitable that Landi’s house had suffered a similar fate in the mudslides, which destroyed or damaged more than 500 homes. But when she returned, the house was untouched.

‘‘You go through something like this, and you lose somebody – and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because I’m really grateful that our house is OK – but you almost don’t care,’’ she said.

After suffering back-to-back natural disasters, local officials are rethinking how they warn residents about impending threats and designate evacuation zones.

Much of Montecito was evacuated in mid-december when the massive Thomas fire blazed on the mountainsides that border the area.

The flames left vast swaths of barren land in their wake, clearing the way for the rain-soaked soil to cascade down toward homes in the foothills.

In the days before the storm struck, Santa Barbara County officials declared a local emergency and issued a mandatory evacuation order for part of Montecito. But only a voluntary evacuation warning was issued for areas further away from the hillsides.

County Sheriff Bill Brown said that, in retrospect, the areas officials designated as voluntary evacuation zones were no safer than mandatory ones. ‘‘Had we known what we now know, we would have evacuated the entire area.’’

While many people in both the voluntary and mandatory evacuation zones left the areas, enough stayed to make the mudslides the deadliest disasters in Santa Barbara County’s history, Brown said.

‘‘The problem is, sometimes the focus is on the word ‘voluntary’, rather than the word ‘evacuation’,’’ he said. ‘‘The reality is, it’s still an evacuation area.’’

– Washington Post