"California never just gets a fire. When the rain comes, then you get the mudslides and a further cycle of disasters, maybe not on the same scale, but you almost certainly are going to lose more homes and have more property damage," said University of California, Irvine history Professor Mike Davis.

When the wildfires scorched more than 750,000 acres of southern California, an area just slightly smaller that the U.S. state of Rhode Island, they destroyed all vegetation on mountains and hillsides.

Now when heavy rain falls this winter, there will be nothing to stop it from penetrating directly into the soil. In addition, waxy compounds in plants and soil that are released during fires create a natural barrier in the soil that prevents rain water from seeping deep into the ground.

The result is erosion, mudslides and excess water running off the hillsides, often causing flash flooding in the communities below.

"There is likely to be a lot of flooding that will occur. We will very likely have landslides as a result of this and the reason that happens is vegetation plays a big role in holding soil together and in slowing runoff of rainfall," said Doug Hammond, professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California.

SAN BERNARDINO AREA WILL BE HIT HARDEST The picturesque neighborhoods in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, with their rugged steep slopes, are likely to be the hardest hit of all the areas struck by California's raging infernos.

"The slopes of the San Bernardino mountains have been burned from the bottom all the way up to the plateau with Lake Arrowhead," said Philip Rundel, professor of biology at UCLA's Institute of the Environment.

Experts said the mudslides and flash flooding could be particularly grave this winter because the vast amount of land scorched leaves so many communities vulnerable.

"The seriousness of it is that we now have vegetation stripped off the mountains in a continuous belt for 40 miles from San Bernardino to San Dimas. That means you're going to get high erosion rates over a huge area," said Richard Minnich, professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Riverside.

"I know that when we start getting heavy winter rainstorms, there's going to be an amazing amount of runoff and mud going into adjoining neighborhoods," Minnich said.

The mudslides and flooding could begin as soon as the next few weeks with the first rains of the season, Rundel said.

Experts said that while the flooding and mudslides would be most severe this coming winter, the consequences of the wildfires could be felt for many years to come.