Then again . . .

I have to revise my feelings about this storm. It's been a nasty storm. The most rain in so short a time in Los Angeles history. I heard we got seventeen inches from this storm alone. A lot of people died. Some seven or eight hundred traffic accidents. The one that gets me is the man who left to go get ice cream and came back to find his home, his wife and kids buried in the mud.

From the AP wire: LA CONCHITA, Calif. (AP) 1.11.05, 1:30p -- First came the sickening crack of splitting earth, then a sudden roar as dirt and vegetation swallowed home after home and people in them. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the latest victims included an unidentified man found wedged in a tree in Topanga Canyon; an 18 year old woman crushed by a falling tree; a 35 year old woman swept away by raging waters in San Bernardino County and a 79 year old woman run over by her husband, who couldn't see her in the downpour.

Alerted to the landslide by screams and honking horns, some in this sliver of a town found themselves literally racing the fast-moving flow downhill as it tore through cars and telephone poles.

"It was like the hillside turned to liquid. It all came down," Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Joe Luna said.

Four people were confirmed killed, 14 were injured and 20 to 27 were missing after Monday's slide, triggered by the latest in a wave of powerful storms that have saturated Southern California terrain. Twelve of the injured were hospitalized, two in critical condition, Luna said. . . . Joining the search was Jimmie Wallet, who said he had left his wife and three daughters to pick up some ice cream when the slide hit. Emerging from a store, he watched the collapse curve toward his block and ran to his home, but it was buried under the muck.

Wallet, 37, told The Associated Press he worked alongside firefighters to rescue two people from the debris Monday, and saw one of his neighbors pulled out dead. He identified the man as Charlie Womack, 51.

Early Tuesday, Wallet's face and clothes were caked in mud after digging for five hours overnight in a desperate attempt to find his 36-year-old wife Michelle and three their daughters, Hanna, 10, Raven, 6, and Paloma, 2. He said had not yet given up hope.

"I know they've got to be there. I'm not going to stop," he said after crawling with several friends under roofs that, propped at an angle on trapped cars, created clearings under the debris pile.

However, he said, there were no longer screams coming from beneath the debris, as there had been a day earlier: "I'm not hearing screaming any more."

. . .