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Slideshow: Victim search expands in Santa Barbara as mudslides kill ...
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victim search expands in
Santa Barbara as mudslides kill 17
Updated 5:15 p.m.
A storm that slammed Santa Barbara County is over. The search for its victims is not.
At least 17 people were confirmed dead Wednesday,
with 13 reported missing cases and possibly more, according to Santa
Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown.
Authorities in Montecito were still trying to reach
new areas and dig into the destruction to find dead, injured or trapped
people after a powerful mudflow swept away dozens of homes.
Those numbers could increase when the search is
deepened and expanded Wednesday, with a major search-and-rescue team
arriving from nearby Los Angeles County and help from the Coast Guard
and National Guard along with law enforcement.
They'll focus first on finding survivors across 30 square miles that are affected.
"Right now our assets are focused on determining if
anyone is still alive in any of those structures that have been
damaged," Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said.
About 100 homes were destroyed and 300 more damaged,
Santa Barbara officials confirmed. Eight commercial properties were
also destroyed.
Crews have been cleaning up roads in Burbank and Sun
Valley that were blocked by Tuesday's mudslides. Things are slowly
getting to normal for some reasidents.
Cleanup crews drove bulldozers and dump trucks
through La Tuna Canyon Road, taking out massive amounts of debris in an
effort to reopen the street to cars. With morning skies clear and sunny,
residents were grabbing shovels and digging mud, gravel and large rocks
out of their driveways.
Grace McKeehan had been able to get back to her
home on foot after leaving early Tuesday morning. She said the past
month has been nerve-racking.
“Between the fires — that was scary — and then anticipating this, this is a first," McKeehan said.
Although her driveway was a mess, McKeehan was glad
to find her home undamaged. Clean up was taking longer further up La
Tuna Canyon Road, where dozens of homes remained under evacuation.
Overall, at least 25 people were injured, while 50
or more had to be rescued by helicopters, authorities said. Four of the
injured were reported in severely critical condition.
A storm-related death was also reported in Northern
California, where a man was killed when his car was apparently struck
by falling rocks in a landslide Tuesday evening in Napa County.
Most deaths were believed to have occurred in Montecito, said Santa Barbara County spokesman David Villalobos.
At least 500 people are helping clean up, officials
said. That number doesn't include utility crews working to restore
power, water and gas to impacted areas.
The wealthy enclave of about 9,000 people east of
Santa Barbara is home to such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Rob Lowe and
Ellen DeGeneres.
Winfrey's home survived the storm and slides. In an
Instagram post she shared photos of the deep mud in her backyard and
video of rescue helicopters hovering over her house.
"What a day!" Winfrey said. "Praying for our community again in Santa Barbara."
A mud-caked 14-year-old girl was among the dozens
rescued on the ground Tuesday. She was pulled from a collapsed Montecito
home where she had been trapped for hours.
"I thought I was dead for a minute there," the
dazed girl could be heard saying on video posted by our media partner
NBC4 before she was taken away on a stretcher.
Twenty people were hospitalized and four were
described as "severely critical" by Dr. Brett Wilson of Santa Barbara
Cottage Hospital.
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.
Jonathan Reichlen witnessed the mudflows from his home in Toro Canyon.
He says he feels “very fortunate” that his house
was not directly affected by the mudslides, although his access is
currently cut off and he lacks water, electricity, gas and internet
service.
He’s one of many who didn’t heed evacuation warnings.
“I chose to stay, knowing that I was out of the direct flow if there was going to be a mudslide,” he said.
Intense rain woke him at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday. He
looked outside and saw the entire sky lit up bright orange. Lightning,
he thought, but later learned it was the gas line that had ruptured.
He said that at 3:55 a.m. he heard the roar of the hillside giving way.
“It sounded like a freight train was coming down
the canyon,” he said. “If you had a twig that snapped right next your
head, that was [the] trees that were snapping as the mud flow was coming
down.”
Thomas Tighe said he stepped outside his Montecito
home in the middle of the night and heard "a deep rumbling, an ominous
sound I knew was ... boulders moving as the mud was rising."
Two cars were missing from his driveway and he
watched two others slowly move sideways down the middle of the street
"in a river of mud."
In daylight, Tighe was shocked to see a body pinned by muck against his neighbor's home. He wasn't sure who it was.
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.
U.S. Highway 101, the link connecting Ventura and
Santa Barbara, looked like a muddy river and was expected to be closed
for two days.
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. "Power lines were down, high-voltage power lines, the large
aluminum poles to hold those were snapped in half. Water was flowing out
of water mains and sheared-off fire hydrants."
Hartmann watched rescuers revive a toddler pulled unresponsive from the muck.
"It was a freaky moment to see her just covered in mud," he said.
Hartmann said he found a tennis trophy awarded in 1991 to a father-son team his wife knows.
"Both of them were caught in the flood. Son's in the hospital, dad hasn't been found yet," he said, declining to name them.
The first confirmed death was Roy Rohter, a former
real estate broker who founded St. Augustine Academy in Ventura. The
Catholic school's headmaster, Michael Van Hecke, announced the death and
said Rohter's wife was injured by the mudslide.
Montecito is 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.
In Burbank, debris runoff damaged to a gas line and
broke a fire hydrant. The storms also caused a three-quarter-inch gas
leak to a line on Country Club Drive. As a result, residents on that
road do not have utilities, according to an update from Burbank city
officials.
Mandatory evacuation orders remain in effect there.
The La Tuna Fire burned three homes and 7,000 acres in the Verdugo Hills.
KPCC reporter David Wagner was at the scene this
morning where bulldozers worked to remove debris. He said the scene
looks much the same as it did last night.
"There's still quite a bit of work to be done before residents are going to be able to get back to their homes," Wagner said.
He came across David Mutchler shoveling debris out of his driveway this morning.
"We've had a lot of rain come down where it's taken
a few garbage cans everynow and then, but this is the first time where
I'm actually shoveling earth just to clear the driveway," Mutchler
said.
___
Dalton reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press
writers John Antczak, Michael Balsamo and Brian Melley in Los Angeles
and Alina Hartounian in Phoenix contributed to this report.
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