Wilson Declares Disaster in O.C., 6 Other Counties

As Orange County struggled to recover from one of the most destructive storms in its history, Gov. Pete Wilson declared a state of emergency to help repair damage to public and private property that is now projected to climb as high as $40 million.

The governor’s proclamation, following two days of requests from local officials, made Orange County one of seven that will now be eligible for state disaster assistance in the wake of the torrential rains that have whipped the state in recent weeks. The move also enables residents who suffered uninsured property losses to tap low-interest government loans.

“I’ve wondered long and hard what’s taken so long” for the governor to declare the emergency, said Orange County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, whose eastern-county district saw some of the heaviest damage in its rural canyon areas.

“The magnitude of the damage we incurred has justified a declaration before this,” he said. “I’ve never seen it so widespread--from a tornado in Lake Forest to the mudslides in Laguna and San Clemente, to all the flood and road problems. It was just an array of things that happened simultaneously . . . and really tested our system of response.”

The storm’s aftermath was felt across the county Tuesday:

* In an upscale Anaheim Hills neighborhood, city officials raised from three to 25 the number of homes that have suffered structural damage, and they said dozens more are in jeopardy because the weekend’s rains reactivated an ancient landslide.

* From Dana Point to San Clemente, beaches remained closed as millions of gallons of raw sewage continued to spew from a sewer line in Mission Viejo that was ruptured Monday in a mudslide.

* And on the Irvine-Tustin border, county officials discovered that a rain-battered wooden bridge had lost its base of support, and they quickly made plans to tear it down.

The Bryant Avenue bridge, a much-traveled route that crosses over a flood control channel between Jamboree Road and Culver Drive, was closed about 11 a.m. after officials discovered it had sunk up to 10 inches in some portions. Inspectors initially thought that they could repair the problem within the day, but they later realized the problem was much more serious.

“It has to be demolished, replaced. The support is literally gone,” said Bill Reiter, the county’s operations manager for public works. It might take up to six months to get a new bridge up, but Reiter said the risk far outweighs potential inconvenience. If the bridge had stayed up much longer, he said, “we could’ve dropped somebody in there.”

Similar assessments on how to deal with storm damage were going on around the county as officials took advantage of the clear weather to inspect sites.

While fair skies are expected through the weekend, forecasters said tempestuous weather may persist through March because of the rebirth of El Nino--the warming of equatorial waters in the Pacific Ocean that often spawns potent tropical storms.

But for now, said John Sibley, chief deputy director for the county’s Environmental Management Agency, “it looks like we’re through the eye of the storm. . . . We’re just hoping for some dry weather so our guys can get some rest and we can assess the damage.”

Already, disagreements have emerged over the severity of the storm’s destruction.

Officials with the state Office of Emergency Services estimated the known damage to public and private property in Orange County at $15.5 million.

“It’s not looking as bad as we first thought,” said Gardner Davis, regional director of the agency in Los Alamitos. “From looking at the damage (in Orange County) on television, we thought it was going to be much, much worse, about $50 million.”

But county officials put the figure at $40 million or more, and they gave the state that dollar estimate late in the day, marking a key first step in the often laborious process of determining claims for state and possible federal emergency relief funds.

“This is mind-boggling,” Reiter said of the damage. “We had a major, major flood last year in February, and this damage far exceeds that.” The storm immediately drew comparison to infamous downpours in Orange County history--including 1916, 1969 and 1983-- but officials said it will likely be weeks before they know how this one stacks up against those.

Officials said money will have to be found to repair and replace eroded bridges, damaged flood control channels, ruptured sewage pipes, fallen homes and even a $40,000 county shrub shredder that was crushed by a boulder in a canyon mudslide over the weekend.

It could also cost millions to repair a flood-control channel that collapsed Saturday afternoon in Mission Viejo--but first county officials have to figure out what went wrong.

“We’re dumbfounded,” said Tom Connelie of the County Public Works Department. “It must have been some sort of a flash flood or something. We’re still trying to figure out how such a large amount of water appeared in such a short period. We looked at the pictures and said, ‘This can’t be a normal rainstorm.’ ” A restaurant and a hotel were destroyed as water flooded across Coast Highway.

But “the biggest unknown” in determining the full extent of the county storm damage, said Connelie, is in Anaheim Hills, where several dozen expensive homes and five streets may have been damaged in the storm.

That could influence the final total dramatically, he said.

The ground has moved at least an inch both laterally and vertically over the past few days, and the slippage accelerated Tuesday, according to Natalie Lockman of Anaheim’s Public Works Department. Officials said there has been at least $55,000 in damage to city roads and sewers, and said homeowners’ losses were more than $330,000 and expected to rise.

On Rimwood Drive, an exclusive neighborhood that sits beneath a 50-foot hill, the streets had buckled in several spots and two large chunks of sidewalk were pushed out of the ground and broken in two because of the pressure from the slippage. A back-yard swimming pool had twisted and split, and several homes had cracks in the walls and foundations.

“I don’t know what could have been done, and I don’t think any man could know what to do,” said Mike Bradshaw, who lives on Avenida de Santiago, overlooking the cliff. “This hill has not moved an inch in thousands of years, now it’s moving an inch every day, and it might even move more than that tomorrow.”

Police forced Bradshaw and his next-door neighbor, who refused to comply with Monday afternoon’s evacuation order, to leave Tuesday. The city also announced that the 43 evacuated families would each be allowed to return to their homes--many valued at $1 million--for an hour to collect what they would need for the next three to five days.

City spokesman Bret Colson said he was unsure how long the evacuation would last, and said the order was intended to ensure residents’ safety. “Their homes can be replaced, but they cannot be,” he said.

Only one of the 43 families evacuated from their homes had accepted the Red Cross’ offer for motel expenses; the rest chose to stay with friends or family or find their own hotel accommodations.

As neighborhood residents gathered to gawk at the cracks in the street, geologists surveyed the area, inspecting 55 homes and working to pump water out of the hillside. As of 5 p.m., the city had declared that 12 homes had sustained moderate damage and 13 more had suffered minor damage.

Residents first alerted officials to the sliding earth six months ago, and a city-hired engineering firm reported in November that the homes built in 1977 sit atop a landslide that dates back millions of years and recently began to slip slowly once again.

“The landslide may continue to move at its present rate for months or even years, or it may suddenly accelerate and move several tens of feet in a time period that could vary from a few minutes to several hours or days,” wrote the geologists of Eberhart and Stone. “An increase in the rate of movement is likely to occur . . . as ground water levels rise within it.”

Shmuel Ben-Shmuel, a unemployed aerospace engineer who has lived on Burlwood Drive for about three years, said “the city should have been more aggressive and solved the problem before the rains came.”

But city officials said they did all they could, hiring an engineering firm to research the situation and then, upon hearing the preliminary report confirming the slide, asking the firm to propose options for mitigating the problem.

“It’s an engineering question, not a politician’s question,” Mayor Tom Daly said Tuesday. “The timing may not be ideal, but there have been good-faith attempts by the city government to address the problem and to understand the problem.”

In Laguna Beach, meanwhile, residents evacuated from another upscale neighborhood tried to salvage belongings after three large, custom-built hillside homes were destroyed by a sudden mudslide early Monday, with a total loss of $3 million.

“Geologists are re-looking at the homes today. We think they are OK, but we are trying to be on the cautious side,” director of municipal services Terry Brandt said of the affluent Mystic Hills neighborhood, where about 100 residents were evacuated for a few hours Monday.

As many as 50 minor mudslides caused damage around the city during the storms, Brandt said. City workers spent Tuesday clearing debris from streets and reopening Laguna Canyon Road, which was flooded during the massive rains, and a private engineering firm will be investigating the cause of the mudslides. And residents who lost their homes are still trying to determine whether their insurance covers the damages.

Tuesday afternoon, friends and neighbors gathered at the slide-devastated home of the Hitzel family to help salvage clothing, furniture and other valuables from the wreckage, forming a line to pass the belongings down a steep slope of mud to the street.

Marjean Hanson, who owns a second house ruined by the slide, said geologists have advised the families to wait at least three days for the earth to settle and dry out before they commence the heavier part of the salvage operation.

Hanson, a schoolteacher, said on Tuesday she was still “in partial shock” after a harrowing Monday morning, followed by the news that the four-bedroom house where she lived since 1963 and raised five children is no longer habitable. Fire Department officials and geologists “have told me I can never live in my home again,” she said. Hanson said she is still unsure where she will live or even how she will get to work in Mission Viejo in the coming weeks and months. “We are just (making decisions) one day at a time,” she said.

Orange County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, who represents much of the South County area hit by mudslides and flooding, said there will no doubt be debate and possible lawsuits over who is financially responsible for the damage. But he said Gov. Wilson’s emergency proclamation “takes the pressure off everybody” by freeing state relief funds.

In addition, Wilson spokesman Franz Wisner said, “the governor will likely be asking for federal assistance once we get better damage assessments. . . . Right now our resources are focused on the cleanup effort. Once things have settled down a bit, we’ll be able to send more people into the field to complete those assessments.”

Times staff writers Leslie Berkman, Timothy G. Chou, Marla Cone, Catherine Gewertz, Kevin Johnson, Terry Spencer and Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.

Widespread Damage Across Orange County

After a weekend of mudslides, tornadoes and driving rain, the sun finally appeared Tuesday in Orange County, only to cast new light on storm damage which, officials say, will continue to mount.

State of Emergency

Gov. Pete Wilson on Tuesday proclaimed a state of emergency in Orange County, where damage estimates climbed to $40 million. This includes projections of up to $20 million in Anaheim, where a landslide area has endangered 43 homes. The declaration clears the way for state and federal disaster assistance:

Disaster Assistance:

* The state will pick up 75% of the cost to repair or restore public property or facilities.

* State housing loans are made available to owners of damaged residences through the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

* State agencies can lift certain regulations and use available money for rebuilding.

More Homes Endangered by Landslide

* Families from 43 Anaheim Hills homes evacuated

* Minor to moderate flood damage to 25 homes

* Large fissure in landslide area has moved laterally and has dropped three inches since Saturday

* Hardest-hit area is 1000 block of Rimwood Drive

* Although city lists current damage at about $380,000, county officials said that total could soar to $20 million given the landslide danger

* Homes were built on a 15-million-year-old landslide zone that city officials only recently discovered

Major Damage Areas

City and county officials have begun tallying up the damages. Areas with the most damage: Anaheim: $20.0 million * County public works: 8.4 million Laguna Beach: 2.6 million San Clemente: 2.4 million Lake Forest: 1.2 million Dana Point: 1.0 million * Projected

Sources: County of Orange, California Office of Emergency Services, City of Anaheim;

Researched by KEVIN JOHNSON / Los Angeles Times