Heavy rains led to nightmare before Christmas with flooding, mudslides as risks persist
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Misty Cheng described what happened as the “nightmare before Christmas” — when tons of water, mud and rock flowed through her Wrightwood home Wednesday.Her experience was among the worst caused by a winter storm that drenched Southern California and also underscored risks faced across the region, especially for those who, like her, live below the burn scar of a recent fire.
Ten inches of rain fell in mountain areas this week, and the deluge was heavy in the Wrightwood area below where the Bridge fire blazed through 56,000 acres in 2024.That made Cheng’s hillside home — which was well away from the fire itself — vulnerable, in much the same way that hillside neighborhoods near the Eaton and Palisades fires are especially at risk a year later.
The heaviest part of a storm system that wrecked Cheng’s home and pummeled the Southland subsided Thursday, but off-and-on showers and thunderstorms hit some areas locally heavy at times.Risks from flooding as well as mudslides in recent burn areas persisted, with Los Angeles County burn-area evacuation orders extended through Friday at 1 p.m.Cheng, a 49-year-old accountant, was away from her house when a wall of mud and water piled up against it.
A neighbor who entered told her that looking through her sliding glass door to the outside was like looking into an aquarium’s glass wall.She asked her neighbor to open the front door and a door to the garage — so that if the mud and water broke through, the water at least could pass through the house.The sliding glass doors held, but a garage wall collapsed.
The water flowed through the house and out the open front door, but much of the mud stayed behind in her two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath home.She had been in the process of restoring and enhancing her 1960s-era home.“Now instead of remodeling, I don’t know where to start,” she said.“There is just so much debri...