Dion Peronneau says she was awoken by the sound of cracking around 4 a.m. Monday morning. When she looked outside, she saw a tree coming down as a wall of mud slid toward her home in Los Angeles’ Baldwin Hills neighborhood.
“We put chairs up as if that was really going to stop the mud from breaking the glass,” Peronneau told KTLA 5 News. “The next thing we saw was that it took the whole sliding door off.”
Over the next several hours, Peronneau could only watch helplessly as the mud overwhelmed her backyard patio and ultimately crashed through a bedroom window.
Her home hasn’t been ‘”red-tagged” – at least not yet.
“The fire department said just be prepared to evacuate,” she said, as she waited for a visit from her insurance company.
Peronneau’s home is among the first casualties of the historic atmospheric river storm lashing Southern California since Sunday.
Upwards of 6 inches of rain fell in the Baldwin Hills area as of Monday morning, one the heaviest totals of the storm to date, and rain continued to fall in the area.
Mudslides were also reported in Beverly Glen and Studio City, and localized street flooding was widespread across Southern California.
Flood watches and warnings were issued for much of the Los Angeles metro area, Ventura County and the mountains of Riverside and San Bernardino counties where up to 14 inches of rain was possible, according to the National Weather Service.