Many Homeowners Get That Crumbling Feeling : Failing Foundations Crop Up in Several Areas, Including Cypress, La Palma

Fran Goodsell sweeps her floor these days with a rake instead of a broom.

“It’s like camping out all the time,” said her husband, Bill, 39.

“At our house you need to wipe your feet when you leave rather than when you come in,” quipped Fran, 36.

Beneath their good humor, though, is a vein of despair. For nearly two months, the couple have been living with dirt where their floors used to be in their home in Lakewood, a southeast Los Angeles County community of 75,500.

The reason: an unusually high sulfate content in the soil beneath their house, which has caused the concrete slab upon which it is built to literally crumble away. The cure: to remove the slab piece by piece, replace 12 inches of the dirt beneath it with sand over plastic, then cover the whole thing up again with a sulfate-resistant concrete--an arduous process that, if completed by professionals, could cost as much as $70,000.

Lives on Hold

The Goodsells’ insurance carrier--State Farm Fire & Casualty Co.--has so far refused to pay for the work. So at least until September, their lives are on hold as Bill, taking meals in the backyard, devotes more than 40 hours a week to the project while holding down a full-time job as an aircraft-maintenance supervisor for American Airlines. He estimates that by doing the work himself, it will cost about $15,000.

“It’s just terrible,” said Fran, a psychologist with the Los Angeles County Office of Education. “Nobody should have to live this way.”

In fact, they are not alone. Since last year, city officials say, the owners of about a dozen of the 132 homes in the 23-year-old Sunshine Homes tract just southwest of Del Amo Boulevard and Interstate 605 have reported the telltale cracks in their concrete floors that, accompanied by a characteristic white powder, indicate the presence of the destructive sulfates--salt-like substances derived from sulfuric acid.

The Goodsells, who have canvassed their neighborhood to determine the extent of the problem, calculate the number of homes affected there at more than 100. And in the last year and a half, experts say, similar cases have surfaced throughout Southern California, especially in La Palma, where as many as 100 additional homes possibly have cracked and, in some cases, crumbling floors. If the concrete slab is not replaced, the entire structure of a house can be endangered.

Awaiting Responses

To date, according to the Goodsells, three Lakewood homeowners besides themselves have started or completed repairs, a process that can require relocation for as long as a year. Another 25, they said, have made claims to their insurance companies and are awaiting responses. And the rest, they said, have done nothing.

In most cases, they said, the insurance companies have either agreed to pay or indicated their willingness to do so. Prudential Insurance Co. of America--which homeowners say has honored the claims--issues a variety of policies specifically covering or excluding a variety of ills. “We make decisions on a case-by-case basis,” said Lou Zuccaro, a staff attorney for the company. “Sometimes it costs you more to investigate the causes of a loss than to pay for it.”

But nine affected homes in the tract, according to the Goodsells, are covered by State Farm, which has so far rejected their claims.

“There is a specific exclusion in our homeowner policies for the deterioration, cracking or shrinking of . . . cement,” said Michael Bragg, a State Farm attorney at the company’s corporate headquarters in Bloomington, Ill. “People all over the country build homes on soil that is often unstable, has a high alkaline content or some kind of clay. It has never been our intention to cover those kinds of cases where the earth works to damage homes” through natural elements, he said.

The Goodsells disagree. In fact, they and several of their neighbors--not to mention dozens of disgruntled homeowners elsewhere--have retained attorneys who plan to file lawsuits on their behalf demanding that State Farm (and in a few cases, Farmers Insurance Group, which also has rejected some claims) pay up.

“We feel that the language currently in existence in their policies covers this particular circumstance,” said Robert E. Beekman, a Tustin attorney who represents the Goodsells and more than 20 clients with a similar problem, mostly in Lakewood and La Palma but also scattered throughout Cypress, Norwalk and Cerritos. The denial letters of the insurance companies, he said, “pick up words and phrases from a multitude of provisions within the contracts in an attempt to exclude things that they never envisioned. But these are all-risk contracts. All perils should be covered, unless specifically excluded.”

Tip of the Iceberg

Beekman believes the cases that have emerged so far represent only the tip of the iceberg. “The problem out there is extremely widespread, and it’s just going to grow over the next few years,” he said. “I venture to guess that a very large percentage of the homes in the area . . . will be experiencing these problems.”

A central issue, of course, is just what is causing the problem. There seems to be no consensus.

A geological report on the Goodsells’ property filed by Lockwood-Singh & Associates, a Los Angeles engineering and geological firm, attributes the deterioration there to “physical and chemical interaction between the concrete slab, and the likely high sulfate-mineral content of the soils.”

“Minor cracks may have initially occurred in the concrete slabs due to normal curing of the concrete,” the report said. “Once formed, the cracks act as conduits for capillary upward movement of the sulfate-rich moisture in the underlying soils.”

What the report does not address is why the damage occurred in one particular tract and not another.

In La Palma, where 50 to 100 homes in a single tract were affected a year and a half ago, geologists were generally unable to agree on an answer to that question, according to City Manager Paul Bussey. “The reports had a great variety of differences from one engineer to another,” he said.

A similar pattern is developing in Lakewood, where, said city spokesman Don Waldie, soil reports “contradict themselves and don’t focus on one specific cause.”

Jack Eagen, senior vice president of Moore & Taber, an Anaheim geotechnical engineering firm that was contracted by insurance companies to study several of the damaged properties in Lakewood, refused to disclose his company’s findings, citing possible litigation regarding the matter.

But Dave Luka, one of the firm’s employees, was recently quoted in the Long Beach Press-Telegram as suggesting that the high sulfate content of the soil beneath the tract may be attributable to animal droppings left there years ago when the site was a dairy.

Another theory is that soil filler trucked in for the 1964 construction came from near the ocean and, therefore, has a greater-than-average sulfate content. Another is that the site’s proximity to the San Gabriel River has caused the destructive chemicals to be deposited and trapped there.

“Because of fluctuations in the water level,” Waldie said, “some chemicals that were at a lower level may have been brought up.” Conditions that would tend to raise the level at which water is found in the soil, he said, include high rainfall.

One concrete finisher who worked on the original tract construction 23 years ago told The Times that the company supplying cement for the slabs mixed an additive to its product that he believes may have interacted negatively with the minerals in the soil. The homes in the part of the tract where the additive was not mixed, he said, have not experienced the sulfate-induced corrosion.

Because he still works in the construction industry and fears possible retribution from employers, the finisher requested anonymity. Neither the cement company nor the original contractor could be reached for comment, and residents said they believe that both have since gone out of business or have been absorbed by other companies.

Construction industry representatives said the corrosion problem may have been exacerbated by the fact that homes built in 1964 on concrete slabs--which are cheaper than the older method of raised foundations--were generally not constructed with materials resistant to moisture and sulfates.

Today, they said, most Southern California cities require soil reports before construction, and most slabs are made of sulfate-resistant concrete poured over plastic sheets designed to prevent the moisture in the ground from seeping into the home.

In Lakewood, however, even those whose homes have not yet been damaged are beginning to feel the effects of the neighborhood’s plight. The prospective buyers of a house listed for $159,900 down the street from the Goodsells recently backed out of escrow after reading a newspaper account of the tract’s problems. And residents say they are worried about the effect of disclosure laws requiring them to divulge any potential problems to would-be buyers.

“I wish I knew what to think,” said Jonathan Harp, an agent with Tiffany Realty, which has handled properties in the tract. “Obviously, there is an effect for the individuals involved, but I don’t know the effect on sales yet. It’s something that just came down, and we’ll see what happens.”

The Goodsells said they expect to sell their home at full market value sometime after September, by which time they hope to have completed the elaborate repairs. The equity from the sale, they said, will go toward building a new home on three acres of land they own in rural Connecticut.

“We had hoped to make it by this summer,” Fran Goodsell said. “Now I guess we won’t.”