Mudslides destroy 100 homes in California

DeGeneres became emotional when talking about the community in which she lives with wife Portia De Rossi.

“I don’t know how the baby survived”, Mr Berkeley told the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper.

On the fourth day of the treacherous search for victims of mudslides in Southern California, emergency workers found the body of an 87-year-old man in his house, authorities said.

The couple climbed down the room when flooding receded and heard a baby crying near their neighbor’s home.

He said: “It came down so fast; it took people out”. “I think all of us have learned our lessons on this one”.

Two cars were missing from his driveway, and he watched two others slowly move sideways down the middle of the street in a river of mud.

More than 50 people have been rescued already but many places are still inaccessible.

“That’s a fear. We are still very hopeful that we will locate people alive”, he added.

Mike Eliason, a spokesman for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, said that with blue skies overhead Wednesday, officials were working to clear the trees, boulders, downed power lines and detritus from people’s homes that had been swept onto the roads.

Winfrey said she was “praying for our community again in Santa Barbara” as she posted a video on Instagram showing the depth of mud outside her home.

The worst of the rainfall occurred in a 15-minute span starting at 3:30 a.m. Montecito received more than 38 millimetres of rain in five minutes.

The storm came after a 10-month dry spell following torrential rains in January and February of a year ago.

“We had thought about leaving, but we had just had the fires”, he said, referring to the recent wildfires that stripped the area of needed vegetation. The National Weather Service’s list of floods, mudslides, debris flows and landslides in the area is over 60 pages long. Officials say a clerical mistake led to the figure of eight being released.

Santa Barbara County has been badly affected, with thousands forced to leave their homes.

Numerous celebrities have homes in the area.

The death toll in weather-related incidents in Santa Barbara County has risen to 15 early Wednesday, after a storm led to risky mudflows that destroyed 100 homes and damaged at least 300 others in the Thomas Fire burn area.

Living just outside the mandatory evacuation zone, Gary Goldberg said most of his neighbours probably felt out of harm’s way during this week’s deadly California mudslides.

Her parents, Jim and Alice Mitchell, opted to stay home Monday to celebrate the dad’s 89th birthday, ignoring the voluntary evacuation warning.

This comes after a record-setting year of $306 billion of weather and climate-related disaster costs in the United States, its National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.