Hill Gives Way Under Lemon Heights Homes During Land Leveling

A hillside buckled beneath four posh Lemon Heights homes Friday, creating some property damage and nervous moments for residents before workers were able to fill the resulting cavity to prevent the homes from sliding off their foundations.

None of the homes were evacuated after the 12:03 p.m. slide, and Joe Arndt, a supervising construction inspector for the county’s Environmental Management Agency, said there was little chance the homes in the 13100 block of St. Thomas Drive will collapse.

The slide occurred as a grading firm leveled land at the bottom of the 60-foot hill for a new six-home development, county officials said.

The incident produced a rush of fear for Bill Geiger, a 73-year-old retired aerospace worker whose house came closest to tumbling down the hillside.

Orange County firefighters drained his back-yard swimming pool, thinking the volume of water could hasten further collapse.

Geiger, who has lived in the home 25 years, said he noticed a crack developing in the ground by his back fence two weeks ago. That fence partly collapsed when the ground gave way Friday.

“Every day the cracks got bigger and bigger and bigger,” Geiger said as he watched county inspectors check his back yard. “I told the (construction supervisors) that they better look at the cracks but they didn’t do anything.

“This morning I told my wife not to go near the pool because today it is going down the hill,” he said.

As he watched the firefighters drain his pool, Geiger, who after a stroke has been using an electric cart to move about, tried to make light of the incident.

“I don’t care if (the house) goes down,” he said. “It needs a new paint job, anyway. And the neighborhood can use the excitement.”

But moments later, he had to choke back tears as he watched workers backfill the tons of earth that had slipped away. Officials said they could not estimate how much ground slid from the hillside.

Arndt said numerous developers have tried to build on the site in the past 15 years, but have failed partly because of ground slippage.

He said the current landscape contractor, Earthwork Enterprises, had installed 25 40-foot cement and steel beams into the hillside just in the past two weeks in an attempt to provide further support.

“The idea was that (the beams) would keep the dirt in place,” Arndt said. Bill Hand, the senior technician for EJN Geotechnical, the Anaheim-based firm that did the geology study for Earthwork Enterprises, refused to comment on the slide.

Johnnie K. Earnest, the environmental agency’s geologist, said he inspected the site Wednesday and had expressed concern about the ground cracks to the developer and was assured they would be fixed.