People survey a damaged home in Montecito, California. Dozens of homes were swept away or heavily damaged and several people killed as mud and boulders ripped through the neighbourhood. Photo / AP
People survey a damaged home in Montecito, California. Dozens of homes were swept away or heavily damaged and several people killed as mud and boulders ripped through the neighbourhood. Photo / AP
The death toll from mudslides in Southern California climbed to 15 yesterday and 24 people are unaccounted for, as rescue crews searched for trapped, injured or dead victims.
The drenching rainstorm that triggered the disaster early Tuesday had cleared and was no longer a hindrance as searchers made their way across a landscape strewn with boulders and covered shoulder-high in places with mud the consistency of wet cement, which smashed homes and swept away cars.
Fifteen people were confirmed dead and two dozen people remained missing yesterday, said Santa Barbara County spokeswoman Amber Anderson.
Boulders and downed power lines block a road in Montecito, California. The official death toll so far is 15. Photo / AP
"We have no idea where they're at. We think somewhere in the debris field," she said.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said several dozen homes were destroyed or severely damaged, and there were probably many more in similar condition in areas still inaccessible.
"Right now [we] are focused on determining if anyone is still alive in any of those structures that have been damaged."
At least 25 people were injured and 50 or more had to be rescued by helicopters, authorities said. Four of the injured were in critical condition.
The search was set to expand with the arrival of a major search-and-rescue team from nearby Los Angeles County and help from the Coast Guard and the National Guard.
In Northern California a man was killed when his car was apparently struck by falling rocks in a landslide on Tuesday evening in Napa County.
Most of the Southern California deaths occurred in and around Montecito, a wealthy enclave of about 9000 people northwest of Los Angeles, and home to such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Rob Lowe and Ellen DeGeneres.
Winfrey's home survived the mudslides. In an Instagram post on the same day many Democrats were talking about her for president because of her rousing speech at the Golden Globes, 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 on 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 KNBC-TV before she was taken away on a stretcher.
The mud was unleashed in the dead of night by flash flooding in the steep Santa Ynez Mountains, where hillsides were stripped of vegetation last month by the biggest wildfire on record in California; a 1140sq km blaze that destroyed 1063 homes and other structures.
Burned 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.
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 neighbour's home. He wasn't sure who it was.
Authorities had been bracing for the possibility of catastrophic flooding because heavy rain was forecaset for the first time in 10 months. Evacuations were ordered beneath recently burned areas of Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
A man shovels mud onto a street in Montecito following the devastating mudslides. Photo / AP
But only about 10 to 15 per cent of people in a mandatory evacuation area of Santa Barbara County heeded the warning, authorities said.
US 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 rain fell in a 15-minute span starting at 3.30am on Tuesday.
Montecito got more than a 1.27cm in five minutes, and Carpinteria received nearly 2.5cm in 15 minutes.
"All hell broke loose," said Peter Hartmann, a dentist who moonlights as a news photographer for the website Noozhawk. "Power lines were down, high-voltage power lines. The large aluminium 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.
