Calif. slides kill 13
New hell in wildfire zone
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 lift people to safety because debris blocked roads, and firefighters slogged through waist-high mud to pull a grimy 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.
Five of the bodies were found in and around 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, Santa Barbara County fire Capt. Dave Zaniboni said.
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 swept away cars and destroyed several homes, reducing them to piles of lumber. Photos on social media showed waist-deep mud in living rooms.
Some residents were unaccounted for in neighborhoods hard to reach be- cause of downed trees and power lines, 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 his driveway. “I saw two other vehicles moving slowly sideways down the middle of the street in a river of mud.”
Cars were washed off roads, and one was deposited upside down.