Rescue teams are searching for victims of the mudslides that have devastated southern California, with the death toll having reached 15.
Rescue crews are searched damaged and buried homes and cars around Santa Barbara in the wake of the mudslides caused by heavy rain that have also injured at least 25 people and left a number of people missing.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said: "right now our assets are focused on determining if anyone is still alive in any of those structures that have been damaged".
While 50 people were rescued by helicopter due to blocked roads, at last four of the injured remain in critical condition.
Mr Brown said several dozen homes were destroyed or severely damaged, but that figure could go up given that there are areas that are inaccessible.
Search and rescue teams from Los Angeles, the US Coast Guard, and National Guard are working in concert.
At least eight of the deaths occurred in Montecito, a wealthy enclave northwest of Los Angeles where celebrities like Rob Lowe and Oprah Winfrey have homes.
Fourteen-year-old Lauren Cantin was luckily saved after several hours of careful sifting through rubble, slogging through mud, and battling continued early morning rain.
"I thought I was dead there for a minute," Lauren said to rescue workers as she was taken away on a stretcher to the hospital. She appeared to be in good condition despite being trapped for more than six hours in her home.
"To be able to have her come out safely and as unscathed as she was, it was pretty phenomenal," Andy Rupp, a Montecito Fire Protection District firefighter, told NBC Los Angeles.
The mudslides were so powerful that foundations of homes were swept away in the first big storm of the season.
Adding to the complicated scene, boulders were also sliding down hills that had been ravaged during a number of recent wildfires which consumed the region last month - which included the largest such wildfire in California history.
The scorched land, stripped bare of any kind of vegetation which could have acted as a natural barrier to the boulders, did not absorb the torrential rains as it normally may have, causing flash floods in the Santa Ynez mountains.
In some places, the mud was nearly five feet deep.
Authorities had been bracing for the possibility of catastrophic flooding - it was the first time in 10 months the area has seen such heavy rain. Montecito in particular saw half and inch of rain in just five minutes in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Despite an evacuation order for Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties, emergency management authorities have said only 10 to 15 per cent of residents paid attention to it.
Power lines and even the steel poles holding them were swept away by the mudslides and a major thoroughfare - US Highway 101 - is expected to be closed for at least two more days since it is covered in a river of mud.
"This is the worst I've ever seen it. We thought that the fire was terrible, and this is absolute devastation," Scott Groff, a Montecito resident, told CBS News.
