Nearly 50 years ago, when seven inches of rain fell in the mountains above Montecito in 12 hours, triggering “avalanches” in the canyons, they said it could be “the storm of the century.”
“Rocks weighing more than 30 tons ripped loose from the mountainside, clearing the canyons of everything in their path and jamming up behind bridges at critical locations,” the Santa Barbara News-Press reported. “One such jam occurred on the San Ysidro Creek bridge … causing the creek to breach its banks and flood homes on Glen Oaks Drive.”
It was the debris-laden flood of January 25, 1969, four years and five months after the Coyote Fire laid waste to the mountainside above Montecito. And it quickly overwhelmed the small debris basin that had been built after the fire in 1964.