In the wake of last winter’s Thomas Fire and 1/9 Debris Flow, greater Santa Barbara was stunned. We had just witnessed back-to-back forces of nature kill 25 people, destroy more than 100 homes in the county, and traumatize those families who survived. Many of us didn’t know what to do, but we knew we wanted to help.
In the months that followed, thousands of volunteers took action, handing out food, digging out homes, and helping survivors find new places to live, fill out disaster-relief paperwork, navigate insurance claims, and talk with therapists about their life-altering traumas. Others donated equipment and services. Some launched spur-of-the-moment nonprofits, to which many more wrote checks to help keep the recovery work alive.
Now, as the first rains of what looks like an El Niño winter have arrived, a well-connected, privately funded group of women and men, many of whom live in Montecito, has proposed an ambitious plan ahead of the coming storms.
They call themselves The Partnership for Resilient Communities, and they first reached out to community leaders — from emergency responders to elected officials — asking: What can we do to help? Then came their bigger question: What can be done to stop a debris flow from happening again? The answer, of course, is nothing.
But perhaps, they decided, something could be done to capture and slow a debris flow, should another come down from the steep canyons above Montecito. After much research, the partnership settled on a Swiss-born technique: ring nets.
The plan proposed is to anchor ring nets — high-tensile steel-wire barriers — across the upper reaches of Hot Springs, Cold Spring, San Ysidro, Buena Vista, and Romero canyons in the hopes of trapping boulders, branches, and thick mudflow that could be set loose by intense rainfall. But what seemed at first glance a straightforward mechanical solution to a public-safety concern turned out to be anything but.
To accomplish their plan in short order — right now, they’re aiming to install 16 nets by the end of the year — the partnership must secure permission from the U.S. Forest Service and a handful of private residents who own the canyon parcels where the ring nets look to be most effective. More challenging, the partnership must also pull emergency permits from several regulatory agencies, including Santa Barbara County Flood Control, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which must consult with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, respectively, because Montecito’s wild canyons and creeks are critical habitat for the red-legged frog, federally listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, and the venerable, federally endangered steelhead trout.
“There is still rock moving up there in the mountains,” said the partnership’s spokesperson, Pat McElroy, 65, who retired as the City of Santa Barbara’s longtime fire chief on March 17. “Essential to all of this, including getting permission and all the permits, is the urgency of it. We’re trying to get ahead of winter.”