The million-dollar views still come with mudslide risks
MONTECITO, CALIF.>> Roads f looded, trees toppled, creeks raged and residents braced for the deadly catastrophe they knew could come.
It was Jan. 9, five years to the day after a torrent of mud, giant boulders and debris had crashed into Montecito, their coastal town near Santa Barbara, Calif. Back then, hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed, and cars were crumpled like paper. Twenty-three people died.
This time, instead of attending a memorial on the anniversary, residents faced cascading rain that threatened to roil the earth once again. They found themselves fleeing under evacuation orders, with the trauma of the past on their heels.
When they were allowed to return the next day, it was with relief that no funerals needed to be planned.
Montecito can feel like a secret to those who discover it. Tucked into a steep slope, it offers grand views of sherbet- colored sunsets and a glittering sea.
The serenity of the foothills provides refuge to a number of celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, a longtime resident, and the more recent arrivals Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan.
The allure of Montecito, as with many places in California, has proved to also be its Achilles’ heel — where natural beauty means living on the edge of possible disaster. In December 2017, when the area was parched with drought, the immense Thomas wildfire marched through, its flames ravaging the vegetation and leaving large burn scars on the land. The following month, storms arrived, and the mountainsides came barreling down.
Residents of Montecito say they are more conscious of safety precautions now — stocking their homes with solar-powered radios, flashlights, a generator, cots to host people — and that they have a new awareness about storm drainage.
But they refuse to live solely under the specter of natural disasters. It helps that recent additions to the area’s infrastructure proved successful last week.
“I don’t think anyone here was living in fear it could happen any day again — it wasn’t like that,” said Lizzy Fallows. “It was like a one- off thing, which is why people were spooked.”
An extraordinary three weeks of atmospheric rivers have unleashed flooding, mudslides, power outages and fallen trees across Cal i fornia. The stat e was expected to get a reprieve Tuesday, light rainfall Wednesday and then, finally, a longer dry spell into next week.
Fallows, 40, grew up in Montecito and, after living for a time in San Francisco, Australia and Tanzania, fulfilled a dream when she returned four years ago with her family.
Two days after the recent evacuations, Fallows drove around the area in her Tesla, showing her three daughters the Randall Road debris basin, an $18 million project completed last fall that filled up with flood-borne branches, rocks and debris while the water rushed from San Ysidro Creek to the ocean.
“I wanted to show them how the debris basin had done its job,” she said. “Not to scare them, but to show how nature is beautiful and powerful and meant to be respected. And we can coexist if we pay attention.”
Nearby, Aaron Briner, Montecito’s fire marshal, surveyed the creek and the Randall Road basin, which sits on land where several homes were destroyed in 2018.
“It’s a very odd feeling,” Briner said. “Just like there’s a scar there, there’s a scar, I think, within each one of us.”
Kim Cantin says she will never shake the memory of the moment a slurry of earth, water and debris barreled into her family’s cottage and swept her away. Dave, her husband, was found dead on the beach. And the body of her son, Jack, 17, was never fully recovered.
It is the survival of her daughter, Lauren — who was 14 when she was discovered screaming and trapped in mud — that Cantin has focused on since her world was divided in half.
The two moved to a place 10 minutes outside of town, but Cantin still owns the empty lot where dirt and a few trees show no hint of the house with the red brick patio that once stood among them.
“A lot of people have been wanting to buy it,” she said of the property. “I’m just not ready to let it go yet.”
Vacant lots among the multimillion- dollar houses illustrate the trauma that is entrenched in the area.
“For the most part, you see a dirt lot, somebody died,” said Abe Powell, director of the Montecito fire district. “Five years after, they still can’t wrap their heads around rebuilding there.”
Powell, 53, remains troubled by the unheeded pleas he made to residents whose bodies were later found in the debris, as well as whether he could have said something more convincing.
“I can’t forget those conversations,” he said. “A lot of us can’t.”
There are few things stronger, though, than the draw of home.
Carie Baker- Corey, 54, grew up in Montecito and said she enjoyed an idyllic childhood, an experience she wants to pass down for generations.
She had been a wardrobe stylist, but retired after the 2018 mudf low, when she lost her house and suffered a punctured lung, shattered bones and a brain injury. Two of her three daughters died in the mudslide.
Her surviving daughter, Summer, was 12 at the time, and remained in a coma for weeks. When she awoke, she learned that the body of her twin had been found a mile from the house.
Living in an adjacent community since then, Baker- Corey recently purchased a house back in Montecito, but in a different neighborhood than before. It is, she said, the one place where her grief is understood.
On each anniversary of the disaster, she said, her phone lights up with dozens of calls, texts and emails from those who would never forget such a date: Are you OK? What can I do? We love you.
“I don’t know any other place that would be this compassionate.”