Residents of the plush neighborhood of Montecito were suffering ‘evacuation fatigue’ from last month’s deadly wildfires when they chose to ignore orders to leave their homes as deadly mudslides threatened them.
It is one of the reasons why at least 16 people are dead and another 24 are missing as a result of the floods in Southern California, according to locals.
NBC cited officials who said they feared earlier in the week that residents in the plush, 9,000-person population enclave would not listen to their warnings.
As predicted, many did not anticipate how severe the mudslides would be and chose to stay at home on Monday night.
They awoke to their homes being swept away by mud and water.
A mandatory evacuation order was issued for part of the enclave, which is home to nearly 9,000, on Monday night.
Those areas were further from the coast and closer to the hillside areas which were entirely ravaged by the Thomas wildfire last month.
Authorities have said it is still too early to say whether the mandatory evacuation order zone is worse affected than the voluntary zone.
‘This isn’t an exact science in terms of defining where [a mudslide] is going to “happen,”. ‘A lot depends on Mother Nature. This was their best guess estimate of where things were going to occur, and as it turns out, they were exactly right,’ Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said on Tuesday.
Brown added that it was ‘impossible’ to say exactly where the mudslides have destroyed as they continue to work through the chaos.
Experts had been working ‘feverishly’ since the wildfires to avoid the very scenario they now face.
The county’s Public Works Department deputy director said his team had done ‘everything’ they could to prevent it before the storm hit.
Now, they are focusing on clearing the debris and restoring the creeks to put back in place their crucial storm systems before more storms hit.