Row Lowe on the Montecito mudslide: 'I can't get beyond' the 'sadness'

Rob Lowe is doing his part to help the devastation in Montecito, California. The 53-year-old actor appeared on Thursday’s "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" where he talked to his neighbor, DeGeneres, about the destruction in their California town.

“It’s been a really difficult week. The sadness, I can’t get beyond it,” Lowe admitted.

“I think people who live there, we kind of are holding onto each other,” DeGeneres, who has also spoken to neighbor Oprah Winfrey about the disaster on the show, said.

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There are 20 dead and three still missing in Montecito with 179 homes destroyed and more than 200 homes damaged.

Lowe explained that his son, Matthew, stayed behind the night of the mudslide as they were only under voluntary evacuation.

“I had a meeting out of town. At 4 o’clock in the morning, I got a FaceTime from Matthew panicking… fires everywhere because gas lines were rupturing. It was like Armageddon,” Lowe said.

The actor believes that the reason the community suffered so many fatalities was due to confusion.

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“People who saw the fires, they woke up, went out to see what was going on and then were washed away. It was truly a perfect storm of bad events,” he explained.

DeGeneres noted that she’s been told they have a mandatory evacuation in the area for possibly as long as March as they try to clean up the destruction.

They also gave viewers two ways to donate to help with the cleanup – RedCrossMontecito.com and DeGeneres’ Montecito Disaster Relief GoFundMe page.

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Lowe has been actively involved with the community cleanup, inviting local firefighters to his house for dinner and posing with a group of rescue dogs.