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Rescue workers in the California town of La Conchita
have recovered 10 bodies from houses crushed in a mudslide Monday.
Flooding in other parts of the state has killed at least nine people in
two weeks of record rainfall. Eight people remain missing in the small
coastal town of La Conchita.
After working through the night, emergency workers discovered the
bodies of a mother and her three daughters early Wednesday, dashing the hopes of a father who
had been digging through the rubble with the firefighters.
Rescuers used sensitive microphones and fiber optic cameras in their
search for signs of life under the debris. By early Wednesday, no sounds
had been heard for 24 hours, but Ventura County Fire Chief Bob Roper said
workers would continue searching empty spaces until they exhaust all hope
of finding survivors.
"Once we know there are no more voids and we're not getting any sounds,
then we'll start making the decisions to go into recovery mode," he said.
10 people were injured Monday as a wall of mud crashed down on the
small coastal community 100 kilometers northwest of Los Angeles. 15 houses
were destroyed and 16 were damaged.
California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger toured the neighborhood Wednesday and praised the hundreds
of rescue workers on the scene.
"They have been working around the clock and they've been using
state-of-the-art equipment in order to find survivors. So far, they have
rescued 10 people."
Two weeks of rain, which ended Tuesday, broke a century-old record,
dropping more than 40 centimeters of rain on Los Angeles, more than the
region normally gets through the whole winter. Among the fatalities was a two-year-old child who
slipped from her mother's arms into raging floodwaters.
The storms
have also caused flooding that destroyed homes in Arizona and Utah and
heavy snowfall that blocked roads in mountain communities from California
to Colorado.
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