Cars swept away, body pinned against home

LOS ANGELES — In the dark of night, Thomas Tighe saw two vehicles slowly being swept away by a river of mud and debris flowing down the road in front of his house in Montecito, California. Daybreak brought a more jarring scene: a body pinned against his neighbour’s home by a wall of muck.

Tighe is CEO of Direct Relief, a Santa Barbara, California-based charitable organisation that helps disaster victims. This time, the disaster was “literally in my backyard, and front yard,” he said by phone from Montecito, about 145km northwest of Los Angeles.

The scene left Tighe shaken. His voice quivered and he paused several times as he described seeing the body, repeating several times it’s “just so devastating”.

With his street thick with rushing mud it was too late to heed the area’s voluntary evacuation advisory so he woke his wife and children and prepared to get them up to the roof. “I tried not to panic them, but I panicked them,” Tighe said.

For the next three hours he and his neighbours did what they could to keep their houses from being inundated. When daylight came the devastation came into focus. He watched in shock as rescuers plucked a family from their roof, where they had been huddled for several hours with a 3-month-old child. There were car-sized boulders and chunks of buildings on the street. —