Residents explore neighborhoods left unrecognizable by Montecito mudslides

Ventura

MONTECITO - Residents meandered through unrecognizable Montecito neighborhoods on Thursday to check on friends and see the devastation of this week’s mudslide through their own eyes.

The devastation of the mudslide on East Valley Road in Montecito. Search-and-rescue crews are looking for the remaining several people missing.

Those living in areas that were spared from the advancing wall of mud, rock and debris biked and walked, taking pictures of the damage as they went.

Allison Blazer said she’s been making the rounds for a couple of days. She talks to firefighters and other public safety personnel to get updates.

“I go home with the information for the neighborhood,” Blazer said.

She walked over to East Valley Road near Parra Grande Lane to check on a friend who lives at the corner of the two streets close to the creek.

There was a pile of mud, several uprooted trees and the faint smell of natural gas from a broken line in the area. Only a few homes remained standing in the area, but they were not unscathed.

One of them had a collapsed roof that had smashed a car and another had what looked like a small forest crammed into the back.

Before the disaster struck, this small stretch of East Valley Road had at least 10 small homes and a handful of larger ones lining the roadway, which usually was canopied by lush vegetation.

“You almost didn’t notice the creek right there,” Blazer said.

Some residents of Parra Grande Lane, which stretches above East Valley Road, also came out Thursday to see the damage. They are from Houston and lived through Hurricane Harvey last summer. Now they think natural disasters are following them.

Brett Hudson, of Santa Barbara, was in the area to check on his friends’ house. It was fine, apart from a hawk that could no longer fly out of the backyard.

Hudson said he had wanted to return to Butterfly Beach on Thursday to continue shoveling debris from the sand, but his hands were too torn up from working there the previous day.

Like the neighbors from Houston, Blazer was without power and internet access for some time and could not rely on her cellphone’s data to get updates.

“The first couple days, it was sporadic,” she said.

On Tuesday, she headed straight from her home on El Bosque Road to one of the hard-hit neighborhoods where her son lives with his father, but was stopped by law enforcement.

“He doesn’t even know if he has a house left,” she said.

The father and son have been on a ski trip in British Columbia since the Thomas Fire was raging, she said.

Blazer couldn’t quite get over that at the exact same time the slide happened, she and her neighbors were gathered on her street wondering about a glow in the sky.

“My personal experience was the gas explosion fire,” Blazer said. “Out of nowhere outside, it was like a light switch and it was bright.”

But the fire triggered by a gas line broken in the mudslide never got near her home. Her street also escaped damage, she said.

“And now with food and water being offered at a fire station within a block, we feel grateful,” Blazer said.

Blazer said she has lived in the Santa Barbara area for about 32 years and hasn’t seen anything like this since the La Conchita mudslide killed 10 people in Ventura County in 2005.

“But this was our backyard, so obviously it’s more impactful,” she said.

Because she’s lived in the area so long, Blazer has many friends who were affected by this week’s mudslides, including in the area of Olive Mill and Hot Springs roads where she once lived. Like on East Valley Road, homes there were knocked off their foundations by the mud and boulders that were at least the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

She’s in touch with them, too.

As she spoke, a search-and-rescue crew that included two dogs named Stella and Decker rummaged among rocks and debris inside one of the homes still standing on East Valley Road. It had been checked a few times for possible victims, but Thursday was the first time searchers could get dogs in there.

Capt. Gary Pitney, a spokesman for the city of Santa Barbara Fire Department, said there is a blueprint for these kinds of incidents, and it’s being followed.

It’s not something local firefighters are accustomed to. Usually, mutual-aid agreements have them going to places like hurricane-hit Houston or Florida to help with disasters.

And on the tails of the Thomas Fire, these incidents are “taking its toll” on firefighters whose homes were not spared, Pitney said.

The number of fatalities also weighs on their hearts, Pitney said.

The other day, he was working with a boy who had been pushed through the muddy debris and homes on Olive Mill Road before being found on Highway 101 by an off-duty officer, Pitney said. The boy’s father did not survive, he said.

As time passes, the chances grow slim for people being found alive, but crews are trying to be as optimistic as they can.

“We’re still in the active search-and-rescue mode, and we continue to have hope we find survivors, but the timeline for survivability is closing,” Pitney said.

Blazer said she knows people who died in the tragedy. She tries to put the pieces together about what happened as information trickles in regarding the state of neighborhoods.

Through it all, she said, she has remained grounded, although reality sometimes does set in.

“I have to honor my moods,” Blazer said.