Latest Hillside Woes Bring Back Memories of Landslide Litigation : Geology: The predicament of a San Juan Capistrano neighborhood is eerily similar, a San Clemente couple say. In 1983, their bluff-top home was wrecked. They continue to live in the damaged home.

For the past 12 years, Ethel and Edwin Dow have been living on a slipping and sliding hillside that has wrecked their home and dashed their retirement dreams.

Four years after they bought an ocean-view house on a San Clemente bluff, a spectacular landslide struck, damaging 47 homes and plunging the Dows into the topsy-turvy world of landslide litigation.

That was in 1983. Last week, the Dows picked up their morning papers only to read that an eerily similar landslide had forced the evacuation of three families in San Juan Capistrano and was threatening seven properties with collapse.

Like the Dows, those families have learned firsthand that earthquakes are not the only geologic hazard that comes with living in California.

Geologists say that thousands of homes dotting the rolling hills in Orange County are built on land that is susceptible to landslides. The majority of the slides, which have caused an estimated $50 million in damage in the county since 1966, have occurred down south.

San Juan Capistrano officials refused to speculate on what triggered the landslide in the Calle Lucana neighborhood last Sunday. They say the ground has apparently stabilized for the moment, but not before imperiling the seven properties.

While the cause of the slide remains the subject of speculation, several geologists suspect a common culprit.

Water.

Aside from an occasional earthquake, “water is the primary cause of more than 95% of landslides,” said Gerry Nicoll, a Tustin soil geologist who has done research in South County since 1964. “You can almost always find that a defective water line or over-watering saturated the soil and led to the slide.”

Two of the homes endangered by the landslide are on Via Alano at the top of the hill, the others are at the bottom of the slope. The homes are valued from $230,000 to $550,000. Engineers estimated repairs will cost at least $1.5 million.

But the city and the affected homeowners’ insurance companies have already given notice that they would refuse to pay for repairs. The homeowners consulted their attorneys after it became more apparent that their only recourse may be to file a lawsuit.

The Dows faced a similar predicament nearly a decade ago. Ethel Dow of San Clemente said she had never expected to spend her retirement waging legal battles when she and her husband bought their dream house on Via Catalina, where homes were valued at $200,000 to $500,000.

But just after sundown on Dec. 30, 1983, two houses at the end of her cul-de-sac slid off the street down the side of Verde Canyon. A third home, at the end of Via La Jolla just up the slope from the Dows, was carried down the same canyon wall with an 83-year-old grandmother inside. She survived, but the house was destroyed.

In 1987, the city and some insurance companies agreed to pay Dow and the other homeowners a total $8 million for all but two of the 47 homes involved in the slide.

Dow said last week that the settlement was inadequate, adding that she still has to contend with cracks in her driveway and patio as well as separated walls inside.

“Nine years later, we are still sitting up here with the same problems,” Dow said. “It is pretty devastating. We just have to sit it out. Our house is still worthless.”

In many ways, the undermining of the hill on Calle Lucana mirrored the Verde Canyon landslide and the others that have destroyed at least 115 homes in Orange County during the past 25 years, geologists said.

Residents and some geologists speculated that a leak from a swimming pool located behind a Via Alano home began eroding the slope. Water pumped from the pool to make repairs also may have contributed to the hillside’s collapse, they suggest.

Like the Calle Lucana slide, most slope failures are relatively shallow ones, in which only the top few feet of soil, plus the landscaping, slide down the hill.

In fact, last week’s slide recalled another incident in San Juan Capistrano last March when three families were ordered to leave their homes after a landslide toppled trees, shattered retaining walls and tore a chasm into the hillside in the Dana Mesa subdivision, about a mile west of Calle Lucana.

Three affected Dana Mesa homeowners have sued one of their neighbors after discovering that the homeowner had water bills 10 times higher than the average resident in the neighborhood, said Patrick Catalano, a San Francisco attorney who represents the residents.

Catalano, who also represented the victims of the Verde Canyon slide, said the defendants in the San Clemente case agreed to an out-of-court settlement only after investigators found that a leaky water main operated by the city was responsible for the slide.

Nicoll and Iraj Poormand, a geologist with Leighton & Associates in Irvine, say over-watering could have undermined the hill above Paul Filipowicz’s Calle Lucana home, which was hit hardest by the slide last week.

Southern Californians have a tendency to ignore the fact that the area is semiarid, Nicoll said. The plants that are best for stabilizing slopes are hardy natives that are deep-rooted, weedy and not often very pretty.

But instead of drought-resistant plantings, many residents plant flowering ground covers that are attractive but not well-suited to hillsides. Nicoll said a common error, especially in older developments, has been to cover steep slopes with ice plant, which looks gorgeous when it is in full bloom, but is shallow-rooted and very heavy because it stores water in its fleshy leaves.

“This is almost a desert,” Nicoll said. “You don’t water as if it is a rain forest. Heavy watering like that on a slope only invites disasters.”

Nicoll, who said he has worked on more than 50,000 hillside lots in South County since 1964, said residents of South County have to be particularly careful about over-watering because the slopes there are susceptible to slippage after sustained watering.

The area is on bedrock known as the Capistrano Formation, which extends from Mission Viejo to north Camp Pendleton. The formation was created 7 million years ago when the ocean receded, leaving sandy silt and clay deposits.

“About 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, the rainfall in these canyons was 10 times the present amount,” Nicoll said. “The sides of the canyons were cut so deep that they cannot withstand any further erosion.”

But Nicoll and state geologists said that South County residents whose view homes are located on the undulating hills need not be alarmed.

The natural condition of the hillside is not a major concern because modern construction techniques can stabilize almost any hillside if the developer is willing to spend the money, said Allan Barrows, a senior geologist with the state’s Division of Mines and Geology in Los Angeles.

“The developments in south Orange County have been large enough to absorb the high geotechnical costs,” Barrows said. “So the folks there need not worry, but that should not excuse them from taking precautions.”

The Filipowiczs had recently spent thousands of dollars to completely refurbish their 2,200-square-foot home. Now their only hope to recover their investment is to go to court.

Catalano, the San Francisco attorney, said: “From my 15 years in landslide litigation, I never once had a case where someone came out and gave the victims a check.

“The victim always loses because their houses are never as valuable. Nobody is going to buy a house sitting on a landslide.”

Landslide Toll

Geologists say hundreds of homes dotting the rolling hills of Orange County are built on land that is susceptible to landslides: Since the 1960’s, landslides have caused millions of dollars in damage, most of it in south Orange County.

Source: Leighton & Associates Inc.