LIVE COVERAGE: More than a dozen dead in Southern California as rain triggers mudslides
More than a dozen 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 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, 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.
Evacuations were ordered beneath recently burned areas of Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties. But only an estimated 10 to 15 percent of people in a mandatory evacuation area of Santa Barbara County heeded the warning, authorities said.
Military vehicles offloading people rescued from mudslides in #Montecito pic.twitter.com/Vryam2kjAh
— Alys Martinez (@KEYTNC3Alys) January 9, 2018
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.”
The path of the torrent was graphically illustrated on the side of a white colonial-style house, where a dark gray stain created a wavy pattern halfway up the front windows.
Cars were washed off roads, and one was deposited upside down in a tangle of tree limbs. In Los Angeles, a police cruiser got swamped in tire-deep mud.
A stretch of U.S. Highway 101 that connects Ventura County to Santa Barbara County looked like a muddy river clogged with trees and other debris. A kayak was marooned in the flotsam, and a Range Rover was buried up to its bumpers.
Some of the worst damage was on Montecito’s Hot Springs Road, where the unidentified girl was rescued. Large boulders were washed out of a previously dry creek bed and scattered across the road.
A rescuer working with a search dog walked among the ruins of a house as the yellow Labrador wagged its tail and scrambled into a devastated building, looking for anyone trapped inside. Its belly and paws were black from the mud.
The worst of the rainfall occurred in a 15-minute span starting at 3:30 a.m., forecasters said. Montecito got more than a half-inch in five minutes, while Carpinteria received nearly an inch in 15 minutes.
The communities are beneath the scar left by a wildfire that erupted Dec. 4 and became the largest ever recorded in California. It spread over more than 440 square miles (1,140 square kilometers) and destroyed 1,063 homes and other structures. It continues to smolder deep in the wilderness.
The storm walloped much of the state with damaging winds and thunderstorms. Downtown San Francisco got a record 3.15 inches (8 centimeters) of rain on Monday, smashing the old mark of 2.36 inches (6 centimeters) set in 1872.
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Weber reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers John Antczak, Michael Balsamo and Brian Melley in Los Angeles and Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco contributed to this report.
