Streets of Santa Barbara underwater amid torrential rain

Streets across the California coastal city of Santa Barbara were flooded amid torrential rains on Thursday as a slow-moving storm walloped Southern California. The storm dropped some of the heaviest rain on Santa Barbara and Ventura counties northwest of Los Angeles, inundating cities, roads and homes with water.

“Reports of flooded roads throughout Santa Barbara County are coming in,” the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management said on Facebook just after 10 a.m. “Stay off the roads and remain vigilant to changing conditions. Hours of rain are still on the way!”

In downtown Santa Barbara, the Highway 101 southbound offramp at Garden Street was fully submerged under water, a video posted by Caltrans showed. The agency said there was no estimated time for when the road would reopen. 

The flooding came as heavy rain pounded the city (pop. 88,000) and surrounding mountains Thursday morning. The area has already seen a few wet days, and this morning the rain dumped down, falling at alarming rates up to 2 inches an hour, according to the National Weather Service. Locations in the mountains of Santa Barbara County have seen 10-plus inches of rain in the last three days and urban areas in town have recorded up to 6 inches, the weather service said.  

Lisa Phillips, a meteorologist with the weather service, explained the storm is slow-moving and has a “really good moisture plume with it.” This means the system has been sitting there off the coast, pulling moisture from the Pacific Ocean and dumping it over land. 

“It’s continually targeting the same area that is why we are getting such extreme amounts,” Phillips said.

Santa Barbara received a heavy downpours early this morning before sunrise. “Then there was a break and then it rained again and now it’s still raining,” she said, at 2:30 p.m. Thursday.

The weather service issued a flash flood warning, in effect through 4 p.m. Thursday, for southeastern Santa Barbara County, including Santa Barbara, and Carpinteria. (Check the agency’s website for the latest information.) The warning also includes the affluent mansion-filled community of Montecito where many celebrities, including Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, live. The agency warned of heavy rain spawning life-threatening flash flooding, landslides and debris flows.

“That kind of rainfall rate is quite rare — we only see it once every 100 years to once every 200 years,” David Sweet, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Los Angeles office, told SFGATE early Thursday morning. “We saw really intense rainfall rates so that’s why there was so much flooding in the area.”

Several streets in the city of Port Hueneme, a small beach town surrounded by Oxnard and the Santa Barbara Channel, were evacuated due to the storm. About 60 houses were affected by the orders, all in a senior citizen community, said firefighter Andy VanSciver, a Ventura County fire spokesperson. An evacuation center was set up at a college gymnasium.

Three people from the senior community were taken to hospitals out of an abundance of caution, and there were multiple rescues of drivers from flooded vehicles, he said.

The city of Oxnard said in a social media post that many streets and intersections were heavily impacted. “Please stay off the city streets for the next several hours until the water recedes,” the post said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.