On the fateful night of January 9th of this year, Patrick Maynard and other members of Ventura County’s emergency services team watched their monitors as early morning rainfall totals streamed in from gauges measuring a storm cell passing over Santa Cruz Island.
“Over Santa Cruz Island on that night we had rainfall in excess of 9/10ths of an inch an hour,” Maynard said at a recent public meeting in Oak View on debris flow risks. “That storm tracked towards Montecito. Had it turned a little right as it approached the coast, it would have tracked towards La Conchita.”
The downpours from that storm initiated debris flows that struck Montecito, killing 23 people and destroying well over 100 homes. Had the center of that storm moved slightly south, it could have impacted La Conchita, which following weeks of rain in 2005 was devastated by an enormous landslide on January 10 that killed 10 people and destroyed dozens of homes.