As if on cue, a tumble of rocks smacked into a truck holding emergency response workers in Big Sur.

It was July 23, and the county’s emergency service team was giving its federal counterpart a tour of the property damage wreaked by the Basin Complex and Indians fires. The small rockslide on Big Sur’s Coast Ridge Road didn’t hurt anyone, or even dent the county truck. But it delivered a message to Federal Emergency Management Agency staff: After fire comes catastrophic erosion.

“It made a loud noise, which scared us and further illustrated the problem to FEMA,” says Robert Clyburn, an emergency services planner with the Monterey County Office of Emergency Services.

The fires stripped soil-securing vegetation from many of Big Sur’s steep slopes, leaving them prone to heavy erosion. Already, small cascades of rock and dry dirt are tumbling down the mountains. Winter rains will trigger exponentially more dangerous mudslides, bringing down tons of earth, rocks and charred trees. Rivers will wash eroded sediment into reservoirs, exacerbating the flood risk.

“Any amount of rainfall whatsoever will turn the whole side of a slope into a soup,” Clyburn says.

Officials expect mudslides to close Highway 1 this winter– but they don’t know when, for how long, or how often. Slides could also knock cars off the road, muddy drinking water sources and slime homes in their paths.

FEMA could potentially fund mudslide mitigation and grease the communications between agencies, Clyburn explains. But first, the county needs to convince the feds that the burned regions of Big Sur and Carmel Valley need their help.

“We don’t yet know if FEMA will engage on the potential for erosion and mudslide damage,” Clyburn says. “We’re trying to find every resource we can to focus on the problem. We know there will be a problem, without a doubt.”

Involved agencies include the U.S. Forest Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Fish & Wildlife, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California State Parks, California Department of Transportation, California Department of Fish & Game, Monterey County Water Resource Agency, Monterey County Sheriff’s Department and Big Sur Volunteer Fire Brigade.

After completing the preliminary planning, OES will work with local residents and agencies to gauge the extent of slide hazards, and to put selected erosion control measures into place.

The most burnt acreage belongs to the U.S. Forest Service, followed by the state, and finally private landowners. But it’s the last group that stands to lose the most.

Kevin Cooper, a wildlife biologist with the Los Padres National Forest, is the resource adviser for the Forest Service’s Burnt Area Emergency Response team. BAER is composed of roughly three-dozen experts from across the state, including hydrologists, soil scientists, geologists, biologists, mappers, road engineers and archaeologists.

The team will begin its information-gathering phase Aug. 11, Cooper says, in an effort to pinpoint areas that pose the greatest hazards to life and property. Steep, burned slopes with erodable soils leading down to homes, roads and reservoirs are the highest priorities, he says.

Although BAER will analyze the entire burn, it’s only authorized to prescribe erosion-control treatments on federal lands. The team will, however, share its findings with state and private land managers, Cooper says. Finally, BAER planners will hand their treatment plans over to the implementation team, which will scramble to complete work in Los Padres before the rain hits.

Cooper doesn’t foresee a lot of erosion treatment in the steep and remote wilderness areas of the burn, which tend to rebound quickly on their own. Instead, he says, most of BAER’s efforts will focus on getting people and property out of the way before the earth starts sliding. The winter rains are the alarm clock, but he doesn’t know exactly when it will go off.

Historically, the fall’s light showers lead to heavier downpours as early as December or as late as February, Cooper says. BAER may clear channels above bridges, maintain road drainages, and work with the national weather service to warn people about floods.

“That’s probably the main thing we can do to protect lives,” he says. “We can’t always prevent something from happening. The best thing to do is be out of the way.”

The federal Natural Resources Conservation Service will offer advice and technical assistance to private landowners preparing for slides and floods, according to NRCS conservationist Danny Marquis. NRCS also hopes to partner with other agencies to remove debris from waterways in order to reduce the flood risk.

Meanwhile Big Sur businesses, which suffered from revenue loss through the fires, are grappling with the new threat of wet disasters. “We realize that we’ve gone through one catastrophe,” says Jonathan Farrington, general manager of Ventana Inn & Spa. “But we certainly have our eye on the winter months and want to be fully prepared for potential flood damage to Highway 1 or to other infrastructure.”

A highway closure would be especially harsh for businesses that stay busy all year. “We have a high season and a really high season,” says Esalen President and CEO Gordon Wheeler, “so the winter road closing [would] hit us harder, ironically, than other businesses that have already planned to gear down in the winter.”

The coming slides and floods are a near certainty. But with so many other unknowns, planning is a bit of a crapshoot. For now, Big Sur residents and responding agencies can only prepare for the coming rain, with their minds on the shifting soil and their eyes on the sky.

The Big Sur Multi-Agency Advisory Council meets 6-7:30pm, Tuesday, Aug. 12, at the Pfeiffer Big Sur Lodge Conference Center in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, Big Sur.