The Montecito Debris Flow of 2018
Near Santa Barbara, California
Just weeks after the enormous Thomas Fire scorched the mountains above town, tragedy struck the wealthy enclave of Montecito. In the pre dawn dark of January ninth, two thousand eighteen, an intense burst of rain hit the bare, burned slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains, dropping as much as half an inch in about five minutes. With no vegetation left to hold the soil, the hillsides let go.
A wall of mud, water, and boulders, some the size of cars, roared down the creeks and canyons into the sleeping community. Twenty three people were killed, and the body of a two year old girl was never recovered. More than one hundred homes were destroyed and hundreds more damaged.
A long stretch of United States Highway One Oh One filled with mud and had to be closed for nearly two weeks. The disaster was a brutal lesson in a chain that is becoming familiar across California, where wildfire strips the land and the next big storm turns hillsides into deadly rivers of debris. Montecito has since built larger debris basins and catch nets for future flows, but the scars, and the memory of that night, remain.
