Montecito suffered a devastating mudslide in 2018. Now the community has rallied to try to make sure the same thing will never happen again.

Curtis Skene was asleep at 03:30 on 9 January 2018, when he heard the light rain turn into a downpour at his home in Montecito, California. A bright light drew the 64-year-old's attention out of bed, and within seconds, a car came crashing through his window, along with a wall of mud, sweeping everything away.

Skene managed to escape his house and cowered behind an olive tree on higher ground. He watched helplessly as entire eucalyptus trees, boulders the size of homes and 15ft (5m) of deep mud, the consistency of tar, passed through. It flowed roughly two miles (3.2km) from the foothills to the Pacific Ocean. The source of the light he'd seen was a neighbouring home that had caught fire.

"My life was saved by a millisecond. I can't explain it other than to say, I guess it was a near-death experience," Skene recalls.

The 2018 debris flow killed 23 people, injured at least 167 and damaged 408 homes in the roughly 9,000 person town. Today, Skene is credited for spearheading the community's decision to rebuild in a way that didn't just erase evidence of the disaster, but aimed to make sure it would never recur.

His and others' efforts in Montecito have become an emblem of how communities can come together after storms to rebuild a resilient town ahead of future climate-driven disasters.

By 9 January 2018, residents of Montecito were sick of evacuating their homes. For months, homeowners had lived in the shadow of an encroaching wildfire that was inching up from the county to the south, burning more than 200,000 acres (81,000 hectares). While they ultimately escaped the inferno unscathed, by 9 January, many had only just moved their families and their pets back home. So, when orders came from local officials to evacuate once again due to anticipated heavy rains, the warnings were met with scepticism. Fire was known to be deadly, but rain? That was typically considered a blessing.

When the Sun came up the next morning, the rain's damage had rendered the community unrecognisable. Homes were swept off their foundations, creek crossings were carried away, cars were washed into the ocean and so much mud clogged the US 101 freeway that it was shut down for weeks.

Residents later learned that mudflows in the area weren't rare. In fact, two similar but less destructive incidents had happened in 1964 and 1971, but had faded from memory. A commissioned study of historical archives found that Montecito had actually been hit by four larger mudflows in the past 200 years.

Santa Barbara County, which includes the town of Montecito, is like most of Southern California in that its arid terrain makes it naturally vulnerable to shallow landslides and mudflows, which tend to happen on steeper slopes. The region is known as the land where water flows from the hills to the sea. Globally, climate change is exacerbating the intensity of extreme storms and altering rainfall patterns.

It became clear the 2018 debris flow wasn't likely to be the area's last.

"There used to be this thinking that fire season was summer and fall, and there was an interval of time before winter rainy season would begin. That whole paradigm has gone out the window," says Andrew Raff, environmental manager for the Santa Barbara County Flood Control District. "We have a year-round fire season now, where fire season essentially runs right into storm season. And we have this back-to-back potential for back-to-back emergencies."

Montecito officials and residents took a multifaceted response to rebuilding after the 2018 debris flow, including a realisation that new........

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