For weeks, California has experienced a series of storms and mudslides, and while the weather is expected to moderate, county officials are urging residents to continue exercising caution.
“All evacuation orders have been lifted, but there are still some areas where road access is an issue. Many roads were covered with mud and rocks. It’s going to take some time to get things up and moving again,” said Kelsey Buttitta, a spokesperson with the county.
Scott Safechuck, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department spokesperson, added, “The hazardous conditions have led to several dramatic rescue efforts. Over 100 water rescues have occurred in the last several weeks as residents have been pulled from homes and vehicles trapped by rising waters.”
On Monday, emergency responders rescued two people who flipped their kayak off of the coast amid turbulent ocean conditions. “One person was exhausted and clearly overwhelmed by the time rescue swimmers reached them. During a time of extreme weather, it’s important to think things through. Something that might usually be routine can become very dangerous,” Safechuck stated.
California Highway Patrol officer Chris Murphy saw firsthand how a routine trip could turn into a life-threatening event. On Friday, he was serving the Santa Cruz area, just south of the San Francisco Bay, when the emergency dispatcher alerted him to reports of motorists stuck in a “ditch.”
Murphy recalled that “It had been a pretty active week with power lines and trees and mudslides. He wondered about the urgency: Why did the passengers not just climb out if the car was in a ditch? When I got there, it was clearly more than a ditch. It was a deep ravine, and water flowed from all directions.”
He estimates the drop was 30.5 metres (100ft) straight down, and the vehicle was teetering over the edge. Three people were stuck inside, and Murphy feared the car might come loose, rolling to its side and landing on its roof at the bottom of the ravine. He believes the “unpredictable weather” handled the predicament: The driver was familiar with the mountain roads and had not been going at high speed.
“The rain was so heavy; it might have obstructed her vision. When he opened the car door, he found the driver in a state of panic. She still had the vehicle in drive and her foot on the brake. She was just frozen solid. She was afraid to move because she did not want the car to risk rolling forward,” Murphy said.
After calming the driver down, he instructed her to lift the foot off the brake slowly. Satisfied that the car would not fall, Murphy helped the driver and the passengers to safety. He encourages other drivers to be aware of their surroundings in the weeks ahead.
“There are a lot of roadways that still aren’t opened, that they’re still trying to clean up,” Murphy said, pointing to ongoing issues with sinkholes and other hazards. “It’s going to be pretty lengthy to fix those roadways, especially in areas where they washed out, that are usually pretty mountainous.”
Mudslides continue to threaten the state as well, with commuters on Tuesday forced to evacuate a westbound train passing through Niles Canyon, just east of the San Francisco Bay Area, after a 30.5-metre (100ft) mudslide blocked the tracks.
Just one day earlier, about 40km (30 miles) north in Berkeley Hills, another mudslide pushed through the Park Hills neighbourhood, forcing evacuations. Berkeley city councilperson Susan Wengraf had received a call at about 7:30 in the morning from the city manager, alerting her to what was unfolding. When she arrived at the otherwise quiet cul-de-sac on Middlefield Road, she discovered a wall of mud over 3 metres (10ft) high, resting against the northern end of a one-story ranch-style house.
The mud had broken through the wall where the dining room and the kitchen were. As she spoke with the residents there, Wengraf learned that the morning had started just like any other.
The homeowner, she said, went into the kitchen to make coffee. And he sensed that the room was darker than it usually is. And he looked north, and he saw the whole wall was broken through and there was mud right there.” They had heard nothing; he told Wengraf. They hadn’t felt any shaking. It was a complete surprise.
“They were both pretty much in shock,” Wengraf said of the homeowner and his wife. The city of Berkeley had to “red-tag” the house, preventing the couple from going back inside.
“As of last night, it was still considered an active slide. Water was clearly still moving down the hillside,” Wengraf explained.
Alan Kropp, a geotechnical engineer who volunteered at the scene, said that what occurred was a special a landslide called a debris flow. They occur when landscapes become so inundated with water that they flow rather than slide, carrying with them rocks, trees and other debris.
“I’ve seen several thousand landslides in my time. But these [debris flows] unfortunately can be some of the most dangerous because they’re so fluid. That’s why they called it a flow. They can move quickly. And if they hit a house where there’s an occupant, it can, unfortunately, cause death. It can move so fast that you often don’t even get out of the way,” Kropp said with a nod to his 50-some-year career.
With California’s weather anticipated to dry out over the coming weeks, Kropp said the possibility of further “debris flows” is set to diminish. They happen once every 50 or 100 years in an area, he explained.
But that does not mean the danger is completely over. “If there’s still water in the hills and it’s slowly working its way down, you can sometimes – even after some dry weather – have other kinds of bigger landslides. It takes a while for the water to get the depth into the ground,” Kropp said.
Wengraf, the Berkeley city council member, told Al Jazeera that the takeaway is that nature wins. She hopes the recent storms will bring attention to the ongoing effects of climate change across the state.
“Just in my tenure as a city councilperson, I’ve dealt with major earthquakes, with major wildfires and with major mudslides. It’s almost biblical how much natural disaster we are vulnerable to,” she said.
Al Jazeera/S.O
