YUCAIPA, Calif. (AP) — Mudslides and debris flows knocked down trees, plowed into homes and trapped drivers for 10 hours after several Southern California communities were hit by heavy rain, authorities said Friday.
Authorities rescued 10 people traveling in at least six vehicles who were stranded on state Route 38 in the area of Jenks Lake, near the San Bernardino National Forest, the fire district said. The route is narrow and winds through towering trees, curving back and forth up the mountainside and linking cities east of Los Angeles with the resort town of Big Bear Lake.
No one was hurt, and no one is reported missing, Christopher Prater, a public information officer for the San Bernardino County Fire Protection District, said Friday.
The mudslides affected the tiny mountain communities of Forest Falls, Oak Glen and Potato Canyon, the county’s fire protection district said in a statement. One home in Forest Falls had giant tree trunks flung in its yard and piled so high they reached the roof.
Forest Falls was walloped by mudslides three years ago. That was just two years after wildfires ripped through the area, leaving burn scars, or areas where there is little vegetation to hold the soil.
Intense rains pounded the area for more than an hour Thursday afternoon as remnants of Tropical Storm Mario reached the mountainous region, the National Weather Service said.
Kael Steel told KNBC-TV he was driving down the mountain from Big Bear to head to an amusement park when the rain started pounding.
“Suddenly we started seeing rocks and stuff coming down the side of the mountain,” he said.
Steel said cars were turning around telling him the road was blocked. So he headed back up the mountain, but was blocked again. He turned around once more and said the road he had crossed 30 seconds earlier had been wiped away.
“There's no road there anymore,” he said.
The route was still closed as of Friday, the California Highway Patrol said.
Authorities planned to assess the hillside areas impacted by the slides to determine the extent of the damage.
“The community obviously has been impacted fairly significantly,” Prater said. “How bad, we don’t know yet.”
With the possibility of more storms forecast for Friday, San Bernardino County fire officials asked residents to stay alert, and an evacuation warning was in effect for mountain communities already impacted by Thursday’s storm.
Forest Falls saw 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) of rain fall in an hour, and another half inch (1.3 centimeters) after that — far more than the arid Southern California region usually sees, said Kyle Wheeler, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in San Diego.
The rain also fell much faster, Wheeler said, adding that the rainfall rates for summer thunderstorms in the region are more typically about a half inch (1.3 centimeters) per hour.
“They got almost two inches of rain in a two-hour time period,” Wheeler said. “The fact that it happened in such a flood-prone location is just an unfortunate event.”
Elsewhere in San Bernardino County, authorities were searching for a 2-year-old boy who went missing after his family’s vehicle was swept off the road by floodwaters Thursday night in Barstow, according to a post on the Barstow police department’s Facebook page Friday. The boy's father was separated from his son and rescued by authorities, the post said. A message seeking additional information was left for Barstow police.
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Taxin reported from Santa Ana, California.
