Man saves little girl ‘buried under four feet of debris’ in California mudslides

A man has been hailed a hero for saving a baby girl who was buried under dirt and rocks after the deadly mudslides in California.

Berkeley Johnson and his wife Karen crawled out of a window on their roof in the early hours of the morning after boulders and mud came crashing through their home earlier this week. He recalled to KSBY News:

"I heard the rumbling of the rocks and I looked up and the river and the trees were coming down like chum, chum, chum. "We ran into the house and right then the boulders busted through our house."

He was later on the way to check on one of his neighbours when he heard the sound of a baby crying in the dark. He could be seen fighting back tears as he told the television station how he and  a number of nearby firefighters rushed to the child's aide. He recalled to the TV station:

“We dug down and found a little baby, "We don’t know where it came from, but we got it out, got the mud out of its mouth."

He recalled how the little girl was buried about four feet deep in debris, tangled up in roots and nettle. He told CBS News that she was "okay" and had been taken to hospital. He continued:

"We heard this little cry - I don't know how we heard it, since it was so loud with all the [noise]. "We went into this pile, and down in that muck, in the middle of nowhere, was a little baby - a little child, tangled in the roots and the nettle. "If we weren't standing within two feet of that thing, we wouldn't have heard it. “The girl’s OK. It’s unbelievable. “There’s no way that we should have found that child, and probably 15 more minutes, it wouldn’t have been alive because it was cold and it had been there for a while.”

Photo via KSBY.