An epic amount of rainfall drenched Santa Barbara County in Storm Number 13, currently in its last day, taking Gibraltar Reservoir over the top and delivering a historic 12-plus inches to San Marcos Pass in a 24-hour period.
Even Lake Cachuma, from which all the South County draws much of its water, reached 68 percent full, compared to the 31.7 percent when the year began and the county was in Storm Number 9. That's an increase of a whopping 22 billion gallons of water, County Fire Chief Mark Hartwig told the county supervisors this morning. The county is at 274 percent of its "normal to date" rainfall, and at 101 percent of its annual norm in just the fifth month of the rain year.
The new Randall Road debris basin held running water for the first time when San Ysidro Creek took a right turn and jumped its banks sometime last night. At the Santa Monica basin above Carpinteria, the county's largest, only five feet of one of the intake towers showed above the mud, rock, and rainwater filling the basin to 21 feet deep.