SALINAS, California – It was four o’clock when Crystal Urite and her family were awakened by firefighters knocking on the door of her home in Monterey County.
Mud spills began to flow into the burn left by the river fire last summer, and firefighters advised her to evacuate. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Urite did not want to go to a busy shelter. Thirty minutes later, her SUV was under the mud.
The driveway was covered with thick mud, which blew through the garage door and lined the inside with rocks and debris on the mudslide’s mile-long route through the coastal hills south of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Many homes in the Urite area that survived the 75-square-mile river fire were damaged in a pattern as old as the coastal series in California. But as the fire season lengthens due to climate change in the West, residents are realizing that if they escape one disaster, they may not be as happy during the next period.
“The fire was pretty scary, and I did not think the flood would be that bad,” Urite said of the mudslide Wednesday, “but then we woke up with the water and everything ran over.”
Monterey County still had assessors in the field on Friday, but at least 25 structures were damaged and nearly 8,000 residents were placed under evacuation orders, communications coordinator Maia Carroll said. In Big Sur, a section of the scenic Highway 1 washed into the sea Thursday night.
Next week, more rain is forecast for parts of the state.
In the recent downpour, Urite’s car was destroyed, and she needed a backhoe to clean her garage and driveway. The house directly uphill from her was buried in 3-foot debris with mud stains on the roof on Thursday. The house survived a fire season that burned thousands of square miles across California, and was subsequently destroyed.
Mudslides and wildfires are what scientists call simultaneous disasters, with one setting the scene for the other. After the worst fire season in California history last year, during which five of the six largest fires in the state started within two months, rainfall not only brings the wicked season to an end, but holds the possibility of another disaster in.
Sea level rise and stronger hurricanes make floods in the southeast exponentially more dangerous, and droughts in the southwest rage the longer fire season.
As the global climate continues to heat up, so is the settlement with nature, experts say. In 2020, 22 natural disasters in the United States alone caused at least $ 1 billion in damages.
“Heavy rainfall is always a challenge, but if you have the fires and the rainfall within a few months of each other, even a few years apart, you create a whole new category of risks,” Stanford University said. said. studied Professor Chris Field, who helped write a 2012 United Nations report on climate change and disaster risk around the world.
Trees and plants usually stabilize the earth, but after a severe fire, nothing is left to hold the saturated soil in place, and the rain hits the soil continuously through branches and plants instead of being spread by root systems. Once the ground starts to slide, it’s hard to stop, Field said.
“It can really build momentum, like an avalanche in snow,” he said, “and spread land over a very large area.”
Urite’s neighbor, Jarrod Domingos, who lives in the house his parents built, did not evacuate when the river fire burned within 400 meters of his front door and waited with water trucks to defend his property in case the fire broke out. would cause.
“It was a lot of sleepless nights,” Domingos said.
When it was finally over, Domingos knew that the area would need very small showers to stabilize the ground. When a major storm is forecast for this week, he gets nervous. Domingos and some of his neighbors went to Google Maps and calculated the area of the valley’s drainage above his property. He decided it was small enough not to panic.
“It’s never an off-season when you get a disaster,” said Domingos, whose home survived. ‘It’s all related to the fire. There is just no cover at the top. It looks like the moon above. ”