Agoura Hills Water Lines Imperiled : Failing Ridge Threatens Homes

Authorities stood guard in an Agoura Hills neighborhood Wednesday night as a 160-foot-tall ridge beside the Ventura Freeway threatened to collapse and rip open two huge water lines above homes.

Officials said cracks discovered at the top and bottom of a steeply graded slope south of the freeway near the Liberty Canyon Road interchange prompted geologists to declare “it is possible that the slope could fail at any time.”

It was uncertain how much damage could be done to the neighborhood beneath the ridge if both pipes were to break and the water cascaded toward homes. Residents speculated that some yards and lower floors could be flooded.

Besides 30-inch and 24-inch water lines, two major underground telephone cables providing long-distance service to Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Monterey counties and international phone service through a Malibu satellite earth station were in danger of being severed, officials said.

AT&T; technicians rushed to the site to plan ways of stringing bypass cables around the ridge. In the meantime, they attempted to secure the cables with special steel guy wire anchors attached to the ridge top.

Linda McDougall, an AT&T; spokeswoman, said one of the lines is a coaxial cable that carries up to 8,000 voice circuits to the three counties; the other is a fiber-optics cable that is used mostly for business data.

She said technicians were posted at the scene overnight to watch for a possible slope collapse. She said crews would resume their cable-anchoring work at 7:30 a.m. today.

But officials of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District said they have no way of securing or rerouting their two water lines that are buried near the phone cables along the ridgeline.

The 30-inch pipe provides drinking water to 8,000 homes in Agoura, Westlake Village and Agoura Hills. The smaller line carries reclaimed water that is used for irrigation in the same areas.

A Westlake Village-based developer, Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, commissioned grading of the slope several years ago. The firm is building a nearby industrial park and had the hill bulldozed to allow for construction of an extension of Agoura Road.

The road was completed about nine months ago, but Los Angeles County public works administrators have refused to accept it because of landslide problems, said Leeta Pistone, field deputy to County Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

A Cabot official at the slope site on Wednesday described the earth-slippage problem as minor, however.

“We’re going to buttress the hill where it has come down,” said the man, who refused to identify himself. “There are a few little cracks up on top. The side of the slope moved out a little bit and raised the street a little.”

But Las Virgenes water district officials said the unstable hill has caused big problems for them in recent weeks.

District spokeswoman Diane Eaton said earth movement on the ridge apparently caused the 30-inch line to break open Feb. 12, sending 18 million gallons of water cascading down the hill onto Agoura Road.

That break caused major erosion of the hillside and left Agoura Road covered with mud and rocks. It was repaired after about five hours, but about $25,000 worth of water was lost and a nearby preschool filed a $4,500 claim over shutting down for the day because it had no water, Eaton said.

Because some homes in Agoura Hills’ Liberty Canyon tract could be flooded if the pipes broke and water flowed south instead of north toward Agoura Road, families living closest to the hill were told of the threat Wednesday afternoon.

Water district officials asked Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies to monitor the situation overnight when the agency’s consulting geologist issued a report Wednesday morning that the slope was in danger of failing “at any time.”

“A policeman was here waiting to warn us when I came home from school,” said Katy Evans, 18, who lives on Provident Road.

Neighbor Cindy Berman said her family will evacuate if necessary.

“The earth around here has been shifting for the 13 years we’ve lived here,” Berman said. “Something is very wrong with whomever is giving permits out for people to bulldoze these hills. It’s crazy.”

Agoura Hills City Councilwoman Fran Pavley, who lives two blocks from the threatened hill, said the city will ask its geologist to investigate the slope threat, even though the ridge itself is a few feet outside the city limits. She said the city has tougher slope-building standards than the county.