LOS ANGELES_Southern California Edison _ fighting dozens of legal claims related to the Montecito mudslides that followed the Thomas fire _ is pointing the blame on Santa Barbara County and Caltrans for failing to prepare for deadly debris flows they knew were inevitable.
More than 75 lawsuits have been filed against Edison for allegedly igniting the fire, which denuded the slopes above Montecito, making them vulnerable to catastrophic erosion during a heavy storm. On Jan 8. 2018, as downpours soaked the mountainsides, boulder-filled debris tore through the wealthy town, killing 23 people and destroying 130 homes.
On Friday, the public utility sued the county and state agencies alleging that despite decades of warnings, the agencies did not build adequate catchment basins and channels, built low bridges that became choke points and didn't order historic flood zones to evacuate when the storm was approaching. Edison is seeking to have them share any liabilities it faces from the disaster.
The agencies' "poor planning and mismanagement spanning from decades prior to the Montecito Mudslides all the way through the final hours ... directly and proximately caused all or some of the damages that Plaintiffs now seek to recover from Edison," the company alleged.
The complaint referenced reports by the Los Angeles Times, the Santa Barbara Independent and other media, which largely documented the failures over which that the company is suing.
California's two largest utilities, Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric, face billions in damages for sparking devastating wildfires in the last few years. PG&E, saying it could be liable for $30 billion if it's found responsible for the Camp fire in Butte County, announced it would file for bankruptcy this week. Edison has been hit with new claims for November's devastating Woolsey fire.
Edison's lawsuit says the county and state agencies were negligent in allowing development in danger zones and doing little to protect residents and property.
The unincorporated town of Montecito sits on an alluvial fan at the base of the steep Santa Ynez Mountain front. The young range produces vast quantities of van-size sandstone boulders that, during heavy storms, turn into wrecking balls carried by torrents of mud.
In the 1964, after the Coyote fire, the Army Corps of Engineers hastily built basins along two creeks to trap rainy season debris. The catchments are low dams built across the mouth of a canyon. But the military engineers warned the county that these small basins on Cold Springs and San Ysidro creeks would be vastly overwhelmed by a debris flow during significant storm, according to documents The Times found at the National Archives.
"The danger of loss of life and the menace of public health is great," said one memo summarizing the Army's conclusions in 1969.
But the county never moved to have bigger basins built on those creeks and did nothing to improve the existing ones. In fact, the county had agreed to remove the two basins by 2026 to allow the passage of steelhead trout.
Of the 23 deaths last January, 21 people died below those two dams.
And these exact areas had been hit three times before, twice since 1964.
According to Edison's complaint, "of the twenty-four properties that were hardest hit in just one area during the Montecito Mudslides, four were named in old news reports as having suffered damage in 1926, 1964 or 1969."
The lawsuit aims the brunt of its allegations at the county:
_Officials failed to enforce its own ordinances while permitting increasing development in designated flood zones. They allowed walls and other obstacles that would push debris flows higher and farther from their natural course.
_Planners also permitted more than 150 federal, state, county and private bridges to be built over creeks in hazard zones without ample clearance for debris flows. Many of these bridges became clogged with logs and boulders that diverted the debris flow out of the channel and into homes. The California Department of Transportation was named in the lawsuit for the bridges it built along the 101 Freeway and Highway 192.
_The flood control district did not adequately clean out the "already drastically undersized" basins, which gradually fill up with rock and sediment, reducing their ability to trap debris. While county officials have insisted the 11 basins below the burned area were completely cleaned out, their own surveys show they only had 44 percent of their design capacity.
_Emergency managers on Jan. 7 switched from evacuating residents based on a flood map to arbitrarily forcing evacuations for anyone living north of Highway 192. They pulled the flood map off the website _ but it turned out to be "remarkably accurate." Everyone who died was in the flood map's hazard area, but only six were in the mandatory evacuation zone. County spokewoman Gina DePinto told the Independent that the emergency management director's "biggest regret is probably that the map that showed the waterways was pulled."
Edison also named the city of Santa Barbara and the Montecito Water District as defendants.
The utility also accused Santa Barbara of negligence and poor planning for allowing development in the flood zone along a commercial strip in the city that juts into unincorporated Montecito. The water district was blamed for a ruptured main that released "up to 9 million gallons of water," exacerbating the deluge.
