Worries Surface After Woodland Hills Slide

Neighbors and looky-loos tramped through the rain in Woodland Hills on Monday to see damage caused by a mudslide that twisted pavement, crunched sidewalks and inched toward residences.

The slide began at about 3 a.m. Sunday on a slope at the corner of Cerrillos Drive and Buenaventura Street. A 20-yard strip of Cerrillos Street split open from the force of the sliding mud, which tore chunks of asphalt away from the curb and shoved them above street level.

By Monday morning, the upwelling mud had lifted broken slabs about three feet higher.

“I just hope this hill doesn’t come down, or it’ll bury my house,” said Al Foung, who lives across the street from the slope. His water and gas were still shut off Monday, a day after city workers rerouted lines around broken mains.

His was the only residence that remained without utilities, he said.

Residents echoed Foung’s worries, although most said they doubted their houses were threatened because the dirt did not look as if it would surge down the street any time soon. One house close to the slide was evacuated Sunday, and authorities have not yet allowed its residents to return.

“The mud’s coming down in a pretty benign way,” said Bill Wilson, a resident of Buenaventura Street. “It’s not pouring down. Of course, the street is about five feet narrower than it was yesterday.”

Los Angeles City Fire Department officials visited the site Monday to make sure no one was in danger. They said they doubted that any houses were threatened besides the house that was evacuated Sunday, although no one could say whether the hill would slide farther.

Richard Raskoff, a geology professor at Los Angeles Valley College, drove to the area to take snapshots. He was amazed by the damage he saw.

“In 1979 to 1983 there were serious mudslides here, where surface mud would come gushing down . . . but suddenly you have this sort of thing,” he said, motioning to the road.

Raskoff termed the slide an “earth flow” rather than a mudslide because dirt below the hill’s surface was moving. Three days of rain apparently saturated the dirt, which acted like a lever to push pavement from underneath, he said.

The movement was probably due to changes in the landscape of the hill, once a ravine, he said.

“When you change the configuration of a slope, you can create a problem,” Raskoff said.

The hill was terraced so that surface water collected in concrete drainage channels. If pipes had been stuck into the hill itself, they could have drained interior water, he said.

Jeff Thompson of Buenaventura Street said residents tried unsuccessfully to press for better drainage when developers landscaped the slope.

Several Woodland Hills residents said they fought developers for about 10 years over the grading of the hills for more houses. The development company is now defunct, leaving residents unsure of whom to hold accountable.

“The slide is partly due to the heavy rains,” Thompson said, “but it has a lot to do with the development we fought against as well.”