Life on the Slide Means Steel Beams and Jacks : Family Learns ‘You Can Do Anything’ to Save Your Home

Fritz and Mimi Hartwig’s home is the kind of house most people only dream about. From the living room, you can look across the Pacific Ocean to Santa Catalina Island or down the steep slopes of Klondike Canyon to the gently rolling hills below. You can look in almost any direction and see nothing but magnificent pine trees covering the three-acre site.

The Hartwigs have lived in the house for 20 years. They raised their children there and have watched their grandchildren play in the wooded acreage. Last year, they made the final payment on the mortgage.

It was in October, 1983, that the house began to creak a little, and a few small cracks started to show up. Probably something minor, they reasoned, like a leak in the septic tank causing the house to settle.

But just to be safe, they called in an old friend, Robert Smolley.

Almost in Sight

You can almost see Smolley’s home from the backyard of the Hartwig estate. Smolley lives in the middle of the Portuguese Bend landslide, one of the largest and most destructive urban slide areas in the world.

The Hartwig home is high atop the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Rolling Hills, one of the most exclusive residential areas in Southern California.

Both men work at TRW, Smolley as a mechanical engineer and Hartwig as a top executive. But it was more than corporate ties that caused Hartwig to call his fellow worker. Smolley has become something of a guru to the folks who live in the slide area of the peninsula.

Smolley took one look at the Hartwig house and offered his friends a bit of bad news. He said he thought it was sliding.

At first, Mimi Hartwig said, she couldn’t accept it.

But when she took her Christmas tree down last year, she knew Smolley was right.

“There was a big crack in the wall behind where the tree had been,” she said.

“I didn’t know whether to commit suicide or get a divorce,” she said. But she knew neither option would solve her problem, and she and her husband realized they couldn’t just walk away from the house that had been their home for two decades.

“It was all so mind-boggling,” she said as she stood in her yard on a rainy Saturday morning.

She soon learned, she said, that “in order to save your home, you can do anything.”

Used Steel Beams

Smolley had helped many of his neighbors save their houses by substituting massive steel beams for foundations. The process won’t stop the sliding, but it will keep the houses level and structurally sound as the contour of the ground changes. The process is not as awesome as it sounds, because movement is very gradual and the necessary adjustments of the beams become quite routine.

So the Hartwigs moved into a trailer in their driveway, summoned the family priest for good measure, and blessed the task at hand. Workers punched holes through walls, and temporary beams were stuck through the sides of the house. The entire structure was lifted about six feet above its slab floor and massive steel beams were slid under the house. The house was lowered back onto a new floor atop the beams, which can be leveled with jacks at each end.

The steel beam support system devised by Smolley has been adopted by many home owners in the slide area.

Floor Tilts Too Much

John Lambdin, who owns the house across the street from the Smolley home, decided on the same course after the floor in his house began to tilt a little too much for comfort.

“My wife could drop an onion in the kitchen and it would roll to me in the living room,” he said.

When his house is finished, he will be able to level it periodically by jacking up whichever corner is the lowest. Smolley said he has had to do that to his house only once in the last year, although the land on which it is located is moving continuously.

All the houses in the area are on septic tanks rather than sewage lines, and because the houses and the land move at the same rate, the septic tanks move right along with the houses. Some allowances have to be made for plumbing, and that usually consists of flexible joints that allow some movement without breaking. All water and power lines are above ground.

One question that is yet to be resolved is who owns what land.

Some of the houses have moved as much as 400 feet, and the city maintains that because they are no longer in the same place, it is not clear who owns what.

Smolley scoffs at that, contending that the courts have determined that in such cases home owners own whatever land their house is on at any given moment.

Although that does not seem to be a consuming issue today, it could be if the city succeeds in halting the landslide.

But Smolley says he’s not worried.

“I think the landslide is going to win,” he said.