Oprahs home town of Montecito was

[wasupaloopa]

partially covered with a huge mud slide.

12 people are dead and more are still missing.

The mud came down starting at 4:00 AM at 50 mph knocking homes off their foundations.

Hwy 101 was covered in several places.

I live near there and this is the worse mud slide I have seen.

It’s cause was today’s heavy rains and the Thomas fire which was the largest wild fire in CA modern history. The fire is 95% contained

[lunasun]

1. I think Ellen's home also is in that area. I thought town evacuated the area yesterday. I'm surpris

by the death toll considering the precautions taken but I'm in the Midwest and completely ignorant about mudslides

[wasupaloopa]

5. Many people were evacuated during the fire

and were recently returned to their homes.

When the evacuation notice went out last night many people ignored it because the rain was not too bad and they wanted to stay home.

The mud came too fast for them to get out of it’s way.

[Hekate]

7. I just saw an article in the Indy online that is hair raising: a 10 foot wall of mud for an hour...

...in Montecito.

We are in a voluntary evac zone for flooding and our little valley is scorched all over. Most of the houses were saved from the fire, but it was a really close thing. I was quite nervous the other night as I could not get adequate information for Ventura -- everything just points back to Santa Barbara, which is, excuse me, nearly 40 miles away. I think I finally got the right website and FB, but honestly the notification system here sucks.

My husband did not want to leave, convinced that we are safe. So I boxed up a few things to grab in a hurry, and waited it out. The rain has not hit us nearly as hard as it hit Montecito and Carpinteria, and we have good drainage on our street -- but honest to gods, when I walk out my front door I am staring straight up a completely denuded hill with someone's ginormous house right on top and its ginormous deck cantilevered out into space.

You know what I'm sayin'?

[wasupaloopa]

9. Yes I know what you are saying.

I am on the Santa Barbara Civil Grand Jury and we sre trying to meet with the emergency notification folks but they keep putting us off.

Do you live in Ventura County? I talked to John Palminteri of KCET and emergency notification is one of his biggest complaints.

[Hekate]

13. We moved to the city of Ventura at the end of last summer...

Our new home is in a neighborhood just behind a fold in the hills. Some of the neighborhoods we looked at last spring are hardly there anymore, burned down in the Thomas Fire.

I lived in Goleta from 1979 until then, and my husband from 1965 on. We never thought we'd leave, but with the kids grown and me wanting to fix the house and he not wanting to, we finally settled on buying my dream home in Ventura for a whole lot less than it would cost anywhere in Santa Barbara County.

I used to be very civically active, and have plenty of contacts to get started here, but at the moment -- well, it has been a fairly busy segment of time, what with one thing and another.

John Palminteri is right, if he's talking about Ventura. If SB is the culprit... I thought Santa Barbara County had things pretty well in hand, and thought that maybe I was just too new to Ventura to really figure things out. But after struggling repeatedly to get signed up for emergency notifications (NO, I do not want Amber Alerts), thinking I finally had it figured out as of 24 hours ago, only to get two updates hours too late to do me any good ... I may be losing patience.

Since you're on the Civil Grand Jury and are trying to get the emergency notification folks to talk to you, I do have a question about Senior Housing vis a vis emergencies. I have a friend who lives in the cottages downtown, and their instructions for potential evacuation during the Thomas Fire was that since they were in an independent living situation, they were expected to make their own arrangements. According to her, most of the residents don't have cars. She does, and she and a friend drove way out of town, but she was a bit shaken by that. I told her I thought she was within her rights to ask the Housing Authority why they were not prepared to load residents onto school busses (recalling all those unused and drowned busses in NOLA after Katrina).

Sorry this is really long. I don't know if I even answered your question.

[wasupaloopa]

14. We talked to the second in charge of the Housing

Authority today and he said just what you did. Those folks are on their own to evacuate.

The problem is finding money to do all the things we would like to see done.

I retired from Santa Barbara County last year. As county employees we are required to help out in emergencies if called so we are elerted and my phone was getting all the notifications.

During the fire we got four in one night while sleeping

[Hekate]

10. Aside from denial, which every region has an abundance of, it's a matter of geology

While we can't be 100% sure exactly which canyons will ignite in which year, we do know that on the Central Coast we get sundowner winds flowing down the mountains and further south they get Santa Ana winds funneling out of the desert through the passes and canyons. Hot dry wind over dry landscape.

Rain follows usually-dry watercourses, and heavy rain overwhelms them, plus it doesn't soak into burned-over ground fast enough, but runs off the baked outer layer. What does get through creates slippery instability, and can cause mudslides, some massive. Big rocks can be carried quite a way by either flood or mud. Recently burned areas are full of ash and much bigger debris as well, and the ash creates its own slurry.

This is an inadequate thumbnail sketch, but I myself like knowing why things happen in certain areas. What happened to New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina was absolutely incomprehensible to me until I learned more about their earthen levees, holdovers from early agriculture, and a host of other things from politics to personal decisions to lack of transportation. Then it made sense. It did not make it right, and I was outraged -- but at least I felt I could get a small grip on understanding.

[wasupaloopa]

12. In Montecito insurance companies will rebuild

everything. The people there can afford it. It still hurts even though you can rebuild.

I lived in the lower Sierra Mtns 10 yrs ago. A localized thunder storm caused a torrent of water to come crashing down one canyon and washed everything and everyone out. It went through the back of a restaurant and out the front while people were seated at their tables.

It killed many wild and domestic animals

[Hekate]

15. Gods, how awful. It just sears the soul.

How does a person get past such trauma?

Coyote is a presence now that we live in the foothills. There's a trail that runs right past our house, and we've grown used to hearing them, pups and all, down in the barranca, and much closer. Two weeks after the fire started, we moved back. A week later I heard one, just one, and he sounded utterly brokenhearted.

So I rejoiced two days ago when we heard three calling to each other. No pups, though.

[Hekate]

2. It's really really bad. My heart just goes out to those people.I think the parents of that 14 y.o...

...girl who got pulled from her home are dead, just buried in house-high debris and mudflow.

Coming on the heels of the Thomas Fire, one has a sense of exhaustion... Last I heard there was a 30 mile stretch of US 101 covered with mud and/or big boulders; train tracks all twisted. Remember the La Conchita mudslide? People urgently trying to get between SB and Ventura were hiring boats. That's happening again.

My husband telecommutes from where we now live in Ventura. His office in Goleta was going to have a Christmas party in December, but it got canceled because of the fire. Well, they rescheduled to this week. Somehow I think we are just not going to have that holiday party any time soon.

Stay safe, Upaloopa. Stay safe.

[wasupaloopa]

6. My wife works in Goleta and her co workers from

Ventura could not make it in. Their Xmas party was last weekend and they had many firefighters as guests

[cilla4progress]

3. My heart goes out

to you all

[Cha]

4. So sorriy, wasupaloopa!

[tinrobot]

8. I know a number of people in Montecito

Seeing their posts on Facebook today has been simply devastating.

[wasupaloopa]

11. 30 mile stretch of 101 hwy is closed until

Thurs afternoon at the earliest.