The bulldozers are back at Randall and East Valley roads this month, working on the final phase of the Montecito’s newest debris basin — a giant bowl designed to trap boulders and fallen trees and help protect the downstream homeowners on San Ysidro Creek from catastrophic debris flows.
When it is finished in late August, the $10 million Randall Road basin will be the fifth on Montecito’s deadly creeks.
The older basins on Cold Springs, San Ysidro and Romero creeks were quickly overwhelmed after the pre-dawn deluge of Jan. 9, 2018 and could not prevent the worst impacts of the raging rivers of mud, boulders and fallen trees that engulfed whole neighborhoods: 23 fatalities, 500 structures damaged or destroyed, 1,000 rescues in the first 24 hours, closure of Highway 101 for 13 days, and $1 billion in economic losses.
Montecito will be somewhat better protected next time. To help get ready, the county has spent $800,000 expanding the Cold Springs basin by 50 percent. Next year, work will begin on a sixth debris basin on Buena Vista Creek, for $3 million.
Even against the backdrop of these and other public works, though, much of Montecito remains exposed to dangerous debris-charged flows and floods.
According to a $600,000, 168-page study of the historical record entitled “Fire, Flood and Landslide Dam History: Community of Montecito and Vicinity” and released this spring by the Project for Resilient Communities, these events are far from rare.
“This was such a rough experience that trying to learn more about it is sometimes the only way you’re going to get better,” said Pat McElroy, the Project’s executive director and a former City of Santa Barbara fire chief, said of the Jan. 9, 2018 disaster.
The study shows that Montecito and Carpinteria have been hit with four other debris-charged events during the past 200 years that were larger than the Jan. 9, 2018 debris flow — the debris flows of 1825, 1861-62 and 1914; and the debris-laden floods of 1995. That’s an average “return interval” of 48 years between massive debris-charged events here.
In all, the study shows, the South Coast from Gaviota to Carpinteria has experienced 36 debris- flows and debris-laden floods since 1825. Twenty-two of them engulfed large portions of Montecito and Carpinteria — and that tally is likely on the low side because the 19th-century record is sparse, researchers say.
“This was astonishing news to me,” said Larry Gurrola, The lead scientist on The Project’s study and a consulting geologist with 27 years of experience in the tri-counties, “The news reports didn’t call them debris flows, but they referred to them as tidal waves of boulders, trees and water coming down the creeks and banks as a huge wave, destroying everything.
“It seems like every time I came across a Montecito event, Carpinteria was part of it as well,” Gurrola said. “The two watersheds are similar in terrain and geology.”
Two-thirds of the time, Gurrola found, these debris-charged events occurred in post-wildfire conditions — the critical five-year period after a fire has devastated the mountainside and heavy rains are most likely to trigger an avalanche of mud. On Jan. 9, 2018, the massive Thomas Fire was still smoldering as the boulders and burned vegetation surged downhill.
“The recent past is key to understanding the near future,” Gurrola said.
(Melinda Burns photo)
Gurrola scoured newspaper archives; property records; geological survey, topographic and aerial maps; and county, state and federal flood reports to determine the size and frequency of debris flows and debris-laden floods in Montecito, and he mapped the paths they took on Montecito Creek and its tributaries, Cold Springs and Hot Springs creeks.
Gurrola’s creek maps are reproduced in color in the study, along with dozens of historical photos in color and black-and-white — a remarkable record of a community battered time and time again in many of the same places.
The Project, a nonprofit group, now hopes to raise $2 million to map the debris flow paths for the rest of Montecito’s creeks. The goal is to help the county draw up a master plan for protecting the community, McElroy said.
“We’re trying to illuminate the problem and keep it in the public mind,” he said. “I think it makes some people nervous, but there’s no pretending it won’t happen again soon.”
The Project for Resilient Communities is best known for installing two steel ring nets each across Cold Springs, San Ysidro and Buena Vista creeks to catch debris above the existing basins — a $5 million project that was funded with private donations and completed in 2019.
The 1914 Catastrophe
After the 2018 debris flows, UCSB geologists identified what they said was the previous debris flow of that magnitude in Montecito, an event at least 1,000 years old. But Gurrola contends that the 1914 debris flow was the “penultimate” event. In both 1914 and 2018, boulders and trees came surging out of the canyons during extreme rains, riding walls of mud 20 to 30 feet high, permanently altering the topography of Montecito.
Ed Keller, a chief author of the UCSB studies and Gurrola’s former Ph.D. geology advisor, declined to comment. Gurrola’s work was reviewed by his mentor and co-author, J. David Rogers, a geological engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology and an expert in landslide hazards and levee failures.
There are no easy answers for how or even whether to try to “build out of” the fire-flood cycle in Montecito, even as it becomes more dire with climate change.
(Santa Barbara County photo via Montecito Association History Committee)
In the wake of the damaging debris flows that followed the Coyote and Romero fires of 1964 and 1971, respectively, the county Flood Control director concluded that land near the mouths of creeks and along creek banks in Montecito “should probably not be built on at all.”
Wake-up Call?
To date, records show, the county has approved 111 building permits for Montecito properties that were badly damaged on Jan. 9, 2018, including homes, guest houses and garages. Many of the new structures must be elevated to comply with post-2018 federal flood maps; some property owners are stockpiling dirt and rock from the Randall Road debris basin excavation for that purpose.
Any plans to construct additional basins high above Montecito would face enormous challenges, as do the ring nets themselves. Their emergency permits are set to expire at the end of the next year, and Gurrola is recommending that they be renewed.
But Kevin Cooper, a consulting fire ecologist with Montecito Fire, contends that the ring nets, which were installed upstream from the debris basins, “haven’t been proven in their ability to help Montecito.”
(Montecito Association History Committee photo)
“The number of existing nets is not big enough to make a difference, especially since the vegetation has grown back and the debris basins have been cleaned out,” Cooper said. “And this may not be the proper place for them because there are no roads up there.”
In the event of a debris flow, a helicopter would have to drop in a bulldozer so that the rocks and trees trapped in the nets could be redistributed immediately downstream. This would be a difficult and expensive proposition, especially in back-to-back storms, Cooper said, whereas dump trucks can reach the county basins by road and haul away the piled-up debris.
The Project’s study provides “a good wake-up call” by revealing the frequency of debris flows in Montecito, Cooper said. As a next step, he said, the community should consider creating more public space along its creeks “to break out of the destruction-construction cycle.”
“I think people rely too much on the idea that some kind of miraculous engineering is going to save everything,” Cooper said. “One of the most difficult decisions communities must make as climate change worsens flooding is moving part or all of the town away from dangerous areas.
(Santa Barbara County Flood Control photo)
“Is someone brave enough to start this conversation here?”
Melinda Burns is an investigative journalist with 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. As a community service, she offers her report to multiple publications in Santa Barbara County, at the same time, for free.
