Wednesday, January 12, 2005
January 12, 2005
Rescue Crews Search for Life Beneath MudslideBy CHARLIE LeDUFF and JOHN M. BRODER
LA CONCHITA, Calif., Jan. 11 - Rescue workers using sensitive listening devices and cadaver dogs probed for buried victims on Tuesday in a 25-foot-deep mountain of mud and debris left by Monday's mudslide as the rains finally ended and desperate family members kept vigil.
Bob Roper, the Ventura County fire chief, said Tuesday afternoon that monitoring equipment was still picking up faint sounds of life from the debris pile, raising the possibility of survivors. Rescuers pulled three more bodies from the mud on Tuesday, bringing the official death count to six.
"We're looking for any movement," Capt. Conrad Quintana of the fire department said. "A part of an arm. A finger tapping. A cough. Someone crying. Any indication someone is alive in there."
The missing included the wife and three children of Jimmie Wallet, a carpenter who left them briefly on Monday just before a 500-foot-high rain-saturated hillside above this coastal hamlet collapsed.
"He was running toward the mountain while people were running away from it," said Mr. Wallet's mother, Linda Silva, who came to La Conchita on Tuesday to watch rescue efforts and await word of her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. "He ran up there and started digging with his hands. He was yelling, 'I have to get my kids! My kids!' "
Ms. Silva said she had repeatedly tried to call her daughter-in-law's mobile telephone, hoping that the sound of the ringing would lead rescuers to the trapped family. But she received a message saying the phone's voice mailbox was full.
The collapse of the hillside here was a deadly coda to five days of rains across Southern California that have left 20 dead and driven thousands from their homes under threat of floods and mudslides.
Even as skies cleared on Tuesday, 4,000 people were evacuated from the banks of a surging creek miles to the south in the Orange County communities of San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point. Glendale Community College was closed because of the threat of mudslides, and a hiker who had been trapped for three days in a cave by floodwaters in the San Bernardino Mountains was rescued by helicopter.
Among the dead across the region were a man whose body was found wedged in a tree in a canyon, a woman who was run over by her husband, who could not see her in the driving rain, and an 18-year-old woman who was killed when her car hit a fallen tree. Here in La Conchita, where as many as 12 people were missing, 14 people were also injured, 2 of them critically, and roughly half the town's homes were destroyed or badly damaged. Dozens of roads around the area, including U.S. 101 along the coast in both directions between Ventura and Santa Barbara, remained closed because of mud or deep standing water.
The National Weather Service said 17 inches of rain had fallen in downtown Los Angeles since Dec. 27, more than in any other 15-day period on record. The latest storm, which began last Thursday afternoon, brought 8 inches of rain to La Conchita and 11.4 inches to Beverly Hills.
In La Conchita, about 100 rescue workers, including some state prison inmates in orange jumpsuits, dug through the mud in an increasingly gloomy search for any survivors.
Mr. Wallet was allowed to return to the mud pile covering the house where he and his family were staying with friends after pleading with the police on Tuesday morning to let him back in. The police had stopped him, saying no residents would be allowed to participate in the search. He grew frantic and tried to run past a barricade. The police handcuffed and detained him briefly before letting him in to help guide searchers to the house.
The house was owned by Charles Womack, 51, whose body was pulled from the debris on Monday. Mr. Wallet's wife, Michelle, and daughters Hannah, 10, Raven, 6, and Paloma, 3, were in the house when he went to the store Monday afternoon for ice cream just before the hillside came crashing down in a terrifying 15 seconds of ruin. A fourth daughter, Jasmine, 16, was with friends in Ventura on Monday.
Mr. Wallet raced back toward his house. "He didn't move quick enough," said his friend, Ross Keck, a construction worker from Ventura who had come here to help. "Hopefully, there's a chance they're still alive in there. Either that or he's lost everything that matters."
Mr. Wallet's mother said she had asked AT&T to clear her daughter-in-law's cellphone mailbox to allow the phone to ring.
Chief Roper of Ventura County said the way the debris had fallen left rescuers with a hope of finding survivors. "We are still finding concealed spaces large enough to live in and survive," he said. "We have not given up hope on any of the people."
He said a mandatory evacuation of La Conchita had not been ordered because officials had no sign that the mountain was coming down. Monitoring equipment installed after the last major slide, in 1995, had not indicated any movement. More than 100 people had been evacuated from the highway because it was blocked in both directions by mud and overflowing water from the Ventura River, but he said that as of Monday morning he had no reason to believe that La Conchita was threatened.
"I don't believe there's anything else we could have done," Chief Roper said. "This area is known to us and known to the residents as unstable. At this point I don't see that we could have predicted this at all."
Drew McCrary, 47, who has lived in La Conchita for 27 years, was one of those who stayed, and he disputed the official account. He said that county officials were aware that the hillside was highly unstable but failed to order an urgent and mandatory evacuation. He said a friend told him he had heard on a police scanner at 7 a.m., "The Conchita hills are coming down."
La Conchita occupies a scenic spit of land between the base of a tall cliff and the pounding surf of the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Its 200 or so residents are an eclectic mix of middle-class urban refugees, hippies and retirees. The wall of mud divided the town between its relatively prosperous north end and its south end. The slide flattened both a school bus crudely converted to a motor home and a BMW sedan.
Gisela Woggon, 58, lives on Vista del Rincon on the north end of town, in a cinder-block cottage.
Asked why she lived in an area beneath the looming threat of disaster, Ms. Woggon said, "It's a great place for tropical gardening."
She added that she ignored the sheriff's deputies who urged her to leave. "A lot of people stayed," she said, adding: "Where could you go? The river was crested and the highway was washed out."
La Conchita was the site of another major mudslide, in March 1995, when 600,000 tons of earth came tumbling down the hillside, burying homes but causing no deaths. After that disaster, a group of 141 residents sued the operators of the La Conchita Ranch Company, an avocado and lemon orchard perched on the bluff above town, accusing the owners of weakening the hillside by overwatering the trees.
The residents lost the suit, in part because the judge was persuaded that the area was naturally unstable and that the orchard operations had not caused the 1995 mudslide.
Henry and Clara Alviani, who had lived in La Conchita since 1981, were among the plaintiffs. Shortly after the verdict, they moved to a mobile home park in Ventura, about 20 minutes away. They decided that the area was simply not safe and that the authorities were unlikely to do anything about it, Mrs. Alviani said Tuesday in a telephone interview. One of their friends, John Murray Morgan, 56, was among those killed in Monday's slide.
She said that when she and her husband, a retired purchasing agent, moved to La Conchita it appeared to be an idyllic little seaside village. After the 1995 mudslide, she said, property values plunged and the town became divided among those who were seeking monetary damages from the county or the grove operator and those, like her and her husband, who just wanted the county to do something to shore up the unstable hillside above the town.
"It was not the same anymore, and we just wanted out," Mrs. Alviani said.
Steve Bennett, the Ventura County supervisor who represents the district that includes La Conchita, said it was possible that the entire town would be condemned as uninhabitable after two such devastating and predictable disasters.
"Is it a safe place to live now? I have no idea," Mr. Bennett said in a telephone interview. "I'm focused now on trying to help the rescuers. It's going to take some time for the experts to get in there and make that determination."
Charlie LeDuff reported from La Conchita for this article and John M. Broder from Los Angeles. Nick Madigan contributed reporting from La Conchita, and Chris Dixon from Dana Point, Calif.
Rescue Crews Search for Life Beneath MudslideBy CHARLIE LeDUFF and JOHN M. BRODER
LA CONCHITA, Calif., Jan. 11 - Rescue workers using sensitive listening devices and cadaver dogs probed for buried victims on Tuesday in a 25-foot-deep mountain of mud and debris left by Monday's mudslide as the rains finally ended and desperate family members kept vigil.
Bob Roper, the Ventura County fire chief, said Tuesday afternoon that monitoring equipment was still picking up faint sounds of life from the debris pile, raising the possibility of survivors. Rescuers pulled three more bodies from the mud on Tuesday, bringing the official death count to six.
"We're looking for any movement," Capt. Conrad Quintana of the fire department said. "A part of an arm. A finger tapping. A cough. Someone crying. Any indication someone is alive in there."
The missing included the wife and three children of Jimmie Wallet, a carpenter who left them briefly on Monday just before a 500-foot-high rain-saturated hillside above this coastal hamlet collapsed.
"He was running toward the mountain while people were running away from it," said Mr. Wallet's mother, Linda Silva, who came to La Conchita on Tuesday to watch rescue efforts and await word of her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. "He ran up there and started digging with his hands. He was yelling, 'I have to get my kids! My kids!' "
Ms. Silva said she had repeatedly tried to call her daughter-in-law's mobile telephone, hoping that the sound of the ringing would lead rescuers to the trapped family. But she received a message saying the phone's voice mailbox was full.
The collapse of the hillside here was a deadly coda to five days of rains across Southern California that have left 20 dead and driven thousands from their homes under threat of floods and mudslides.
Even as skies cleared on Tuesday, 4,000 people were evacuated from the banks of a surging creek miles to the south in the Orange County communities of San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point. Glendale Community College was closed because of the threat of mudslides, and a hiker who had been trapped for three days in a cave by floodwaters in the San Bernardino Mountains was rescued by helicopter.
Among the dead across the region were a man whose body was found wedged in a tree in a canyon, a woman who was run over by her husband, who could not see her in the driving rain, and an 18-year-old woman who was killed when her car hit a fallen tree. Here in La Conchita, where as many as 12 people were missing, 14 people were also injured, 2 of them critically, and roughly half the town's homes were destroyed or badly damaged. Dozens of roads around the area, including U.S. 101 along the coast in both directions between Ventura and Santa Barbara, remained closed because of mud or deep standing water.
The National Weather Service said 17 inches of rain had fallen in downtown Los Angeles since Dec. 27, more than in any other 15-day period on record. The latest storm, which began last Thursday afternoon, brought 8 inches of rain to La Conchita and 11.4 inches to Beverly Hills.
In La Conchita, about 100 rescue workers, including some state prison inmates in orange jumpsuits, dug through the mud in an increasingly gloomy search for any survivors.
Mr. Wallet was allowed to return to the mud pile covering the house where he and his family were staying with friends after pleading with the police on Tuesday morning to let him back in. The police had stopped him, saying no residents would be allowed to participate in the search. He grew frantic and tried to run past a barricade. The police handcuffed and detained him briefly before letting him in to help guide searchers to the house.
The house was owned by Charles Womack, 51, whose body was pulled from the debris on Monday. Mr. Wallet's wife, Michelle, and daughters Hannah, 10, Raven, 6, and Paloma, 3, were in the house when he went to the store Monday afternoon for ice cream just before the hillside came crashing down in a terrifying 15 seconds of ruin. A fourth daughter, Jasmine, 16, was with friends in Ventura on Monday.
Mr. Wallet raced back toward his house. "He didn't move quick enough," said his friend, Ross Keck, a construction worker from Ventura who had come here to help. "Hopefully, there's a chance they're still alive in there. Either that or he's lost everything that matters."
Mr. Wallet's mother said she had asked AT&T to clear her daughter-in-law's cellphone mailbox to allow the phone to ring.
Chief Roper of Ventura County said the way the debris had fallen left rescuers with a hope of finding survivors. "We are still finding concealed spaces large enough to live in and survive," he said. "We have not given up hope on any of the people."
He said a mandatory evacuation of La Conchita had not been ordered because officials had no sign that the mountain was coming down. Monitoring equipment installed after the last major slide, in 1995, had not indicated any movement. More than 100 people had been evacuated from the highway because it was blocked in both directions by mud and overflowing water from the Ventura River, but he said that as of Monday morning he had no reason to believe that La Conchita was threatened.
"I don't believe there's anything else we could have done," Chief Roper said. "This area is known to us and known to the residents as unstable. At this point I don't see that we could have predicted this at all."
Drew McCrary, 47, who has lived in La Conchita for 27 years, was one of those who stayed, and he disputed the official account. He said that county officials were aware that the hillside was highly unstable but failed to order an urgent and mandatory evacuation. He said a friend told him he had heard on a police scanner at 7 a.m., "The Conchita hills are coming down."
La Conchita occupies a scenic spit of land between the base of a tall cliff and the pounding surf of the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Its 200 or so residents are an eclectic mix of middle-class urban refugees, hippies and retirees. The wall of mud divided the town between its relatively prosperous north end and its south end. The slide flattened both a school bus crudely converted to a motor home and a BMW sedan.
Gisela Woggon, 58, lives on Vista del Rincon on the north end of town, in a cinder-block cottage.
Asked why she lived in an area beneath the looming threat of disaster, Ms. Woggon said, "It's a great place for tropical gardening."
She added that she ignored the sheriff's deputies who urged her to leave. "A lot of people stayed," she said, adding: "Where could you go? The river was crested and the highway was washed out."
La Conchita was the site of another major mudslide, in March 1995, when 600,000 tons of earth came tumbling down the hillside, burying homes but causing no deaths. After that disaster, a group of 141 residents sued the operators of the La Conchita Ranch Company, an avocado and lemon orchard perched on the bluff above town, accusing the owners of weakening the hillside by overwatering the trees.
The residents lost the suit, in part because the judge was persuaded that the area was naturally unstable and that the orchard operations had not caused the 1995 mudslide.
Henry and Clara Alviani, who had lived in La Conchita since 1981, were among the plaintiffs. Shortly after the verdict, they moved to a mobile home park in Ventura, about 20 minutes away. They decided that the area was simply not safe and that the authorities were unlikely to do anything about it, Mrs. Alviani said Tuesday in a telephone interview. One of their friends, John Murray Morgan, 56, was among those killed in Monday's slide.
She said that when she and her husband, a retired purchasing agent, moved to La Conchita it appeared to be an idyllic little seaside village. After the 1995 mudslide, she said, property values plunged and the town became divided among those who were seeking monetary damages from the county or the grove operator and those, like her and her husband, who just wanted the county to do something to shore up the unstable hillside above the town.
"It was not the same anymore, and we just wanted out," Mrs. Alviani said.
Steve Bennett, the Ventura County supervisor who represents the district that includes La Conchita, said it was possible that the entire town would be condemned as uninhabitable after two such devastating and predictable disasters.
"Is it a safe place to live now? I have no idea," Mr. Bennett said in a telephone interview. "I'm focused now on trying to help the rescuers. It's going to take some time for the experts to get in there and make that determination."
Charlie LeDuff reported from La Conchita for this article and John M. Broder from Los Angeles. Nick Madigan contributed reporting from La Conchita, and Chris Dixon from Dana Point, Calif.
