Deadly mud slides hit fire-ravaged California
Flash floods soak area devastated by recent wildfires
Runoff from Montecito Creek floods U.S. Route 101 in the California county of Santa Barbara on Tuesday morning. Mud and debris from hillsides stripped of vegetation by recent wildfires roared into neighborhoods and had killed at least 13 as of Tuesday night, authorities said.
MONTECITO, Calif. — 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 mudcaked 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.
Most 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. At least 25 people were injured.
The mud was unleashed by flash flooding in the steep, fire-scarred Santa Ynez Mountains. Burnedover 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 neighborhoods 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.
Marshall Miller, who evacuated his home in Montecito on Monday with his family, returned to check for damage and found his neighborhood devastated. He never reached his home because two of his neighbors, an elderly woman and her adult daughter, needed a lift to the hospital after being rescued by firefighters.
The pair had left their house before it was inundated with 6 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.”
Some of the worst damage was on Montecito’s Hot Springs Road. Large boulders were washed out of a previously dry creek bed and scattered across the road.
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.
Hartmann watched rescuers revive a toddler pulled unresponsive from the muck.