in Santa Barbara that January, the town’s low-lying homes were pounded by the mountains’ detritus cascading down the hillside toward the ocean in an endless brown river. One father, in a panic, put his young children up on his kitchen’s marble countertop, thinking it the strongest feature of the house, then watched as a rolling boulder smashed through the bedroom where the children had been just moments before. One kindergartner who didn’t make it was found close to two miles from his home, in a gulley traced by train tracks close to the waterfront, having been carried there, presumably, on a
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