Mudslide victim recalls harrowing moments

Montecito man endured deadly carnage of 2018

Marco Farrell has been watching the weather forecast all week. And with a major storm heading for parts of Northern California that burned in wildfires only a few months ago, he has some advice for people living near hillsides that still bear fire scars.

“Get out. Do not wait for an official warning,” he said Tuesday. “Trust your gut. It’s going to hit you a lot harder and faster than you expect. You don’t want to go through the trauma.”

Farrell, 48, survived a huge mudslide that tore through Montecito three years ago, ripping apart his family’s house in the middle of the night and killing 23 of his neighbors. On the evening of Jan. 9, 2018, just one month after the Thomas Fire had burned 281,000 acres, denuding hillsides in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara and Montecito, he was awakened to the sound of pounding rain.

“It was the most horrendous downpour I had ever heard,” he said. “I put on my boots and checked out front. I saw an orange glow from a broken gas line, then I heard a huge noise. I turned and started yelling “Flash flood!” “Flash flood!”

A fast moving muddy river of debris roared down Olive Mill Street, where he lived with his retired parents in a threebedroom ranch house they had owned since 1980. The terrifying torrent carried trees, boulders, parts of houses and cars in a wave of destruction. He slammed the door shut and yelled for his parents to wake up.

“Two or three seconds later, and I wouldn’t have survived,” he said.

As he woke his parents, Jeff and Gabrielle Farrell, the mudslide crashed against the house, breaking down the kitchen door. Within seconds, a dark brown ooze was filling their living room. Farrell instinctively ran to open the back door. It eased the pressure on their home. The decision almost certainly saved their lives.

Lighting the pitch black house with a headlamp, he and his parents sheltered in a hallway with their pet dog for 90 minutes as the calamity unfolded. The mud rose waist-deep, wrecking their furniture.

“It was second-by-second survival,” he said. “If we would have gone outside we would have been swept away.”

What stunned him was the speed.

“The consistency was like pancake batter,” he said. “And it was moving 25 or 35 miles an hour down the street. You can’t outrun it.”

Finally, just after 5:30 a.m., the mud subsided. He went outside and flagged down an arriving fire truck. All around, homes were wrecked, cars were upended, people were missing.

Their family was lucky. The disaster occurred during an atmospheric river storm that dumped half an inch of rain on the steep, burned landscape above their home in 30 minutes, causing it to give way. Forecasts for Wednesday call for similar rainfall rates in Big Sur and the Santa Cruz Mountains, in areas that burned last fall in the Dolan Fire and CZU Lightning Complex fires. Both Monterey County and Santa Cruz County emergency officials, along with officials in southern San Mateo County, issued mandatory evacuation orders for more than 5,000 people living in areas near those fires that are considered at high risk for slides.

Farrell said his family home, which they gutted down to the frame, rebuilt and moved back into just three months ago, wasn’t even included in an evacuation warning area as the storm approached three years ago. That highlights how little authorities know about when and exactly where deadly mudslides can occur. And it highlights the need for people to take seriously large rain events in recently burned areas, he said.

“We think of geology as being about history books and dinosaurs,” he said. “But it is happening in real time.”

A real estate investor and commercial fisherman, Farrell said people living near recently burned hillsides should pay close attention to the weather reports, have headlamps and flashlights ready, and if there is any question about their safety, leave before the rains get too heavy.

During this storm, he’s carefully watching the weather again.

“I’m still juggling the PTSD,” he said. “Who knows where the storm will end up?”