Hollywood Stars React to Montecito Mandatory Evacuation: “Mother Nature Is Not Happy With Us”

Montecito — the celebrity-loved enclave in central California which Oprah Winfrey, Jane Lynch, Jennifer Aniston, Rob Lowe and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, among others call home — is officially under mandatory evacuation. This ruling comes after a fruitless search for a five-year-old boy who was swept away by floodwaters early Monday morning; the search was called off around 3 p.m. local time.

Five years ago, on Jan. 9, 2018, Montecito was ravaged by mudslides caused by flash flooding; in the middle of the night, the town got more than half an inch of rainfall in five minutes, and the storm continued throughout the day, leaving lives claimed, homes flattened, gas mains popped, and power lines down. At the time, these mudslides were made more severe by the Thomas Fire that started in the area on Dec. 4, 2017 — the charred Santa Ynez Mountains were made more vulnerable to destruction because the earth wasn’t prepared to absorb water well.

Today, Ellen DeGeneres, who lives in the area (located between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean), posted a video to her Instagram account showing the severity of a nearby creek’s rising water levels and the current of the steam.

“This is the 5 year anniversary from the fire and mudslides that killed so many people — people lost their homes, their lives,” she says in the video. “This is crazy, on the 5 year anniversary, we’re having unprecedented rain. This stream next to our house never flows, ever. [It’s] probably about 9 feet up … we need to be nicer to mother nature, because mother nature is not happy with us … stay safe everybody.”

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A post shared by Ellen DeGeneres (@ellendegeneres)

DeGeneres shared in the caption that her home is on “higher ground,” allowing her to shelter in place.

Per an article from AP, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said the decision to evacuate was “based on the continuing high rate of rainfall with no indication that that is going to change before nightfall.”

This evacuation order displaces nearly 10,000 residents — the entire town of Montecito plus nearby canyon neighborhoods. The National Weather Service reported that at least 8 inches of rain fell over 12 hours, with several more inches predicted as the storm marches on.

Allan Glaser, a film producer who often collaborated with his late husband Tab Hunter, evacuated his Montecito neighborhood early Monday afternoon to the neighboring Summerland town.

“They actually wanted all of Santa Barbara and Montecito to evacuate, but you can’t evacuate, you know, 100,000 people in a half hour’s notice. It’s impossible,” Glaser said. “They used to give you like a three-day evacuation warning, [but] this just came out of nowhere. I mean, [Monday] morning I wasn’t even thinking of evacuating. I think it caught everybody by surprise, the intensity of it.”

Having experienced the mandatory evacuations due to mudslides in the area five years ago, Glaser knew to move quickly. “Literally, there’s rivers of water coming down steps and you’re taking your life into your hands when you turn out of your driveway to go down the street, because there’s so much water coming down. I can’t say I’ve never seen anything like it, but this is one of the top three most extreme rains I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “I have no idea when I can get home because I don’t know if they’re going to open the freeways or if a mudslide has come down into a road or something.”

In the wake of the mudslides in 2018, Glaser says he and other Montecito residents were displaced for three weeks, waiting for roads to be cleared and infrastructure to be rebuilt. (The northbound 101 freeway is currently closed off, making it impossible to drive past Ventura.)

“This [storm] is much wider…this is Montecito, Santa Barbara, Carpinteria all getting the same intensity,” Glaser says. But at least the rains are not following an earth-scorching fire this time around. “The good news is that the mountains seem to be holding because we’ve had five years worth of growth to hold back the hillsides.”

Les Firestein, a former television writer and founder and editor of The Riv, Montecito Journal’s design magazine, helped spearhead an initiative called the Partnership For Resilient Communities following the mudslides in 2018. This effort is a non-profit public-private organization committed to researching and implementing debris flow technologies from around the globe for the Montecito area — and beyond. The partnership’s work has already made the current flood more manageable than it was five years ago.

“The difference is enormous because of all the initiative we took to beef up our infrastructure and our awareness. Yesterday, obviously, our evacuation was far superior to what it was in 2018. At the time, I think there was more of a muddled evacuation message, and so there was a very low compliance rate of evacuation. I think people also didn’t understand the enormity of the situation,” Firestein says. “I’ve always thought that ‘debris flow’ is a terrible term, because when I think of debris, I think of crumbs, but you don’t think it might be boulders the size of school buses, you know? Now, because of video and because there are such superior efforts and awareness of what happened five years ago — and because we’ve built so much infrastructure and rebuilt infrastructure to more stringent FEMA codes — things look torn to hell because it was a massive rain event, but ultimately, for a town that’s positioned in between the mountains and the sea and that is susceptible to the occasional massive water event…the water and the structures did what they were supposed to do, meaning the water went where it was mostly supposed to go — within limits. This was apparently just a very strong and durable storm.”

Several debris basins are scattered throughout the hills and are thought to be filled to capacity, but the fact that the water is flowing is a silver lining.

A Montecito debris basin is roaring with water and filling with rocks and boulders coming down out of the hills. It was cleared out before this latest series of storms and it’s working as planned by Santa Barbara County flood control. pic.twitter.com/L3DrlzXBRD

— John Palminteri (@JohnPalminteri) January 10, 2023

Actress Jane Lynch, another Montecito resident, tweeted Monday evening: “Bad storm in our little town. We were told to shelter in place. So I made my lemon bars for dinner. But with oranges. So I guess they’re my orange bars. We’re survivalists. We do what we gotta do.” Kathy Ireland called the flooding a “force of nature” along with a video clip. And several accounts have shown residents kayaking and canoeing through the streets as a mode of transportation through the storm.

Lisa Lloyd told THR that she and her husband, actor Christopher Lloyd, left Santa Barbara the day before the evacuations took place. “We didn’t want to take any chances,” she said.

Luke Mullen, a Santa Barbara native, shared: “My hometown of Santa Barbara is completely flooding right now, people are losing homes, and 25,000 people were evacuated. Luckily my family is safe, but don’t look away from the facts: the climate crisis is here, and its only getting worse. How can we expect to go on like this??”

This is one minute away from my home in Santa Barbara right now. This creek rarely even has water in it. Luckily my family and house are safe, but don’t forget that these floods are a direct result of the CLIMATE CRISIS, and this is just the beginning… pic.twitter.com/tWobr8ERDB

— Luke Mullen (@thelukemullen) January 10, 2023

Alisal Ranch, a 10,000-acre working cattle ranch and luxury resort in Solvang, has also been compromised by the storm — in the form of not only flooding but a fire too.

“Due to flooding, Alisal Ranch safely evacuated all guests and employees on January 9. All were provided hotel accommodations in town. All animals were safely moved to higher ground or transported to sites not affected by flooding, thanks to the incredible work of our wranglers and staff at large,” reads a statement shared with THR on Tuesday. “On the morning of January 10, there was a structural fire on the property (a landscaping/maintenance building). The fire was quickly responded to and is now out. All people and animals are safe. Fire investigators are still determining the cause, which is likely due to weather conditions.”

In 2019, Downtown Abbey actor Allen Leech and actress Jessica Blair Herman tied the knot at the ranch; co-stars Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens, and Bohemian Rhapsody’s Rami Malek were all in attendance.