Baby Pulled Out of Mudslide in Laguna Canyon

Inside a pitch-black studio apartment off Laguna Canyon Road, Teresa Serabia tightly clutched her 9-month-old daughter, Tiffany. It was nearly midnight, and she, her husband, Carmelo, and their two other children could hear trees snapping and tumbling on the hillsides above their home.

Then, like lava from a volcano, a torrent of mud split the apartment in two, the force ripping the girl from her mother’s arms.

The baby wailed as she was carried away, and the desperate cries of her mother and father rose over the sounds of the storm.

Several minutes later, a stranger walking up Laguna Canyon Road plucked “a ball of mud” from the flow and handed it to another neighbor, Todd Tingsley, himself trying to find safety in the dark of the night.

“It was pitch black,” Tingsley said. “People were screaming and there was a lot of commotion. When the man handed it to me, he said, ‘It’s a baby Take it.’ It was just a bundle of mud, but I wrapped [her] in my arms and I went across the road.”

Tiffany Serabia suffered only minor cuts and bruises, was treated at Saddleback Memorial Hospital and released to her family a few hours later.

As Laguna Beach residents dug out Tuesday from their second major storm this season, the miracle of Tiffany’s rescue and survival resonated against the tragic mudslides that killed 25-year-old Glenn Flook and injured nine other people.

Members of the Serabia family, now staying at a local motel, were too traumatized by the events to discuss them, an American Red Cross official said.

But Carmelo and Teresa Serabia related details to their employers at the Blue Bell Country Club, a shelter for about 80 cats. The shelter is in a four-bedroom home, and the Serabia family lived in an attached studio apartment.

Dr. John Hamil, a veterinarian whose wife is president of the Blue Bell Foundation for Cats, said the Serabias told him that their apartment was left in wreckage after another home cascaded down the hillside and into the Serabias’ dwelling.

Carmelo and Teresa Serabia were thrust outside the house by the sliding mud and became stuck on a wire fence while Tiffany was carried away. The two older children, Efren and Yvonne, were swept inside a bathroom by the same torrent.

“[Teresa Serabia] could hear the baby crying, but she didn’t know where it was,” Hamil said.

Half an hour later, the two older children were rescued from the shattered apartment, filled with 3 feet of mud. None of the family, though, knew where the baby had gone.

They could not have known she was in the arms of surprised, but protective, neighbors.

Denise Hibben, 23, was with Tingsley when “an older man” walked up with the muddy bundle and gave it to him.

“There was a chicken coop, according to the older man, it was in the slide,” Hibben said. “It was so dark. I don’t know how he saw the baby.”

The baby was motionless, she said: “It was just a big brown bundle packed in mud.”

But she was alive.

The baby became part of their makeshift caravan as they and other residents tried to help each other to safety. They became each other’s rescuers, letting their neighbors’ screams guide them.

“People were on top of their roofs, screaming for help,” said Hibben.

Hibben and several other neighbors, including Tingsley and Fred Stodder, 40, tried to help others get out of their homes, struggling in the darkness to find the safety of high ground as mud moved around them.

They were on the west side of Laguna Canyon Road, with most of the mudslides behind them. They could see the relative safety of a cow pasture across the road. Thigh-deep mud “was like a river,” she said. They joined hands in a human chain to ford the road. Hibben became stuck briefly, but Tingsley yanked her free.

Once they reached the east side of the road, they encountered a barbed-wire fence, which they knocked down.

There, they waited in the dark and the rain, listening to the sounds of mud and fear until rescue crews arrived. Hibbens said she thought they waited for about 45 minutes, but she couldn’t be sure.

Under the circumstances, “time is not a really coherent thing,” she said.

Others joined them in the meadow.

“Some of them were completely in shock,” Hibben said. “We had to keep them warm so we gave them our jackets. We waited there, all of us, in the marshy area, waiting for help.”

Eldon Setterholm, 74, was sleeping when “all of sudden everyone started yelling ‘Get out! Get out! The mountain is coming down!’ I went outside and got knee-deep in mud.”

He climbed along neighbors’ roofs part of the way.

“I ended up doing the breaststroke in the mud,” he said.

Gary Lemonoff was in his trailer, his home of 10 years, when he heard the earth begin to move.

“You know the scrapers? That grinding sound?” he said. “That’s what this sounded like, only it was louder. . . . I tried to open my door. I couldn’t get out. So I stayed inside and rode it out. This [trailer] shook back and forth, back and forth. I heard a lot of stuff going by it in the night.”

It was morning before he could get out.

“The eerie thing is that the neighbors next to me, I could hear them screaming,” Lemonoff said. “They kept screaming at the top of their lungs, ‘Ofelia! , Ofelia!’ ”

John Barber, 45, said houses on both sides of his were surrounded by 3 feet of mud, but his was untouched.

“It felt like we had God on our roof,” he said.

Rescue crews had as much trouble getting in as the residents had getting out, said Capt. Lee Henry of the Orange County Fire Authority.

“There was no way to get here,” Henry said. “All routes to the north were closed. El Toro [Road] was the only way to get in.”

One mudslide filled the artificial ponds behind the Friends of the Sea Lion facility on Laguna Canyon Road, but none of the estimated 75 animals were injured, said volunteer Ananda Davison of Long Beach.

Volunteers who grew concerned Monday evening about heavy weather moved all the sea lions indoors, she said. But the mudslide threw off the day’s feeding schedule and prompted volunteers to release some of the sea lions back into the ocean.

The breadth of flooding and mudslides led Laguna Beach Unified School District officials to cancel classes for the day. The school district’s bus garage is on Laguna Canyon Road.

“We realized we’d first have to get the buses out of there, then we’d have to get the buses to where the kids are, and then get the buses to the schools,” said Kathryn A. Turner, school board president.

Three of the district’s four schools were unscathed by the rains, but Top of the World Elementary School suffered some hillside erosion. Laguna Beach High School doubled as an emergency shelter Monday night, but school officials said they didn’t know how many people sought refuge there.

The Red Cross set up another shelter at Laguna Beach City Hall, where Eugene Gonzales, 35, and his 11-year-old son, Zach, took refuge about 8:30 p.m. Monday.

“I was talking with my friend and I heard a noise . . . like a jet,” Gonzales said. “The initial mudflow was enormous and we just ran. I left my cat there and I thought the mudflow from the side of the house was going to come in. I got up this morning, we went back and found her.”

They also found heavy damage.

“We had a VW and a Honda,” Gonzales said. “The slide came down from the back of the house, went underneath and pile-drived the wagon into the Honda.”

Gonzales said his house has been sealed off by authorities, and he was busy Tuesday afternoon trying to find a temporary place to live.

Landslides and collapsed walls also spilled onto Coast Highway in South Laguna. Debris plugged culverts in the hills behind South Coast Medical Center, where ravines quickly filled with mud that flooded over into streets, forcing closures.

Like the drainage system, Laguna Beach emergency workers were overwhelmed by the disaster.

South Laguna residents Deneece and Al Gabbard called for help at 8 p.m. Monday as waist-deep mud cascaded into their home from a gully. Firefighters finally stopped by Tuesday at 9 a.m. but were unable to provide assistance, Al Gabbard said.

“They asked if we had turned off the utilities and said there wasn’t much they could do,” he said. “They had a lot of other things going on.”

Feet sheathed in rubber boots, Deneece Gabbard stood in a brown stream cascading across Mar Vista street and down her driveway. The flood had washed furniture from the front to the back of the first story of her home, she said, and her husband had rescued their dog from atop a bed where it had fled the rising waters.

The stream in the gully, normally a trickle, had “sounded like a torrential river,” she said.

In Laguna Canyon, residents struggled Tuesday morning to sort through their emotions.

“First off, my neighbor [Flook] is dead,” said Tangerine Bolen. “We tried to evacuate everybody. I called them three times. I started calling [911] about 8:45 [p.m.] and told them each time, ‘We need to be evacuated.’ ”

Bolen said some of her neighbors were forced to take refuge on their rooftops. The house she rents, and where she lost all her possessions in the Dec. 6 flood, was surrounded by mud up to 9 feet deep on Tuesday. She estimated about 70% of her belongings were lost this time around.

“I’m still in shock,” Bolen said in the chill damp of the morning, then began crying. “I’m sorry, I can’t . . . “

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Valerie Burgher, Marcida Dodson, Shelby Grad, Bonnie Hayes, Scott Martelle, E. Scott Reckard and correspondent Liz Seymour. Davan Maharaj can be reached at (714) 966-7847. His e-mail address is davan.maharaj@latimes.com