VIDEO: Maeve Juarez was perched in the worst possible place, but she had no idea. In the middle of the night, the Montecito Fire Department supervisor sat in her truck waiting for the incoming rainstorm.
What she didn’t know was that a massive mudslide was about to trigger a series of events that would very nearly kill her and take the lives of nearly two dozen people. The disaster would force Juarez to make tough choices that may have ultimately saved countless lives.
The Thomas Fire, which devastated swaths of Southern California in December 2017, would go down as the largest blaze in the state’s history at the time. It destroyed some 1,000 structures, including 10 homes in Montecito, the rural but ritzy coastal town nestled in a Santa Barbara County hillside, about 90 miles north of Los Angeles.