Residents recount storm’s harrowing mudslides

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jesus Barron answered his wife’s panicked phone call warning him that a mudslide was smashing into their bedroom in the hills of eastern Los Angeles County. Then, the line went dead.

“She called me and told me the mountain was coming down,” he recalled Wednesday. “I thought the worst.”

Wendy Barron escaped their Hacienda Heights home during Tuesday’s historic downpours in Southern California, but it was seriously damaged when mud flowed down the hillside and blasted through the two retaining walls the family built when they moved in seven years ago.

“It’s not enough to stop Mother Nature, of course,” Jesus Barron said.

The storm fueled by the second of back-to-back atmospheric rivers to hit California in days came ashore last weekend in the state’s north before it moved down the coast and parked itself over the south for days, turning roads into rivers, causing hundreds of landslides and killing at least nine people. It dumped more than a foot (of rain in some areas, making it one of the wettest periods on record for the Southern California.

The Barrons’ home is too damaged for them to live in for the next few months, though the couple was able to retrieve some belongings.

“We love it here,” Jesus Barron said. “However, it wouldn’t be easy to go through this again.”

One final drenching was expected later Wednesday before the system gave way to fair weather for most of the state by the weekend. But even after the rain, authorities warned of the ongoing threat of collapsing hillsides. After all of the rain and snow of the past week, it wouldn’t take much for more water, mud and boulders to sluice down fragile hillsides, experts said. At least 520 mudslides have already occurred in Los Angeles alone.