Anaheim Slide Turns Resident Into Activist : Aftermath: Gerald Steiner is on mission to educate and inform his neighbors of the city’s role in the disaster.

Using his office phone and computer, Gerald M. Steiner has been waging a one-man campaign to educate his Anaheim Hills neighbors about the devastating landslide and who he says is responsible for it.

To Steiner, the slide was “not an act of God” but the inevitable outcome of greedy developers and complacent city officials.

Armed with 20-year-old documents that seem to show that the city was told of the potential landslide problems before the homes were built, Steiner maintains that the city is ultimately to blame for the mess he and 45 other evacuated homeowners find themselves in.

“They gambled that this was never going to occur,” said Steiner, 51, as he sat on a couch in his office and now temporary home in Fullerton. “It was their gamble, but we’re the ones who are paying the price.”

Within days of being evacuated Jan. 19, Steiner had dug through city documents, learned about previous landslides in the area and composed a “public notice” about the situation, which he taped to the garage door of his $1.2-million home on Avenida de Santiago.

His neighbors, desperate for any information about their predicament, grabbed for copies of the flyer.

Since then, Steiner has written three more notices with information on everything from reassessing damaged property for tax purposes to revelations in environmental impact reports. Instead of posting them on his garage door, Steiner now mails them to a growing list of eager readers.

“It’s wonderful that he’s doing this,” said Dolores Davis, who lives just outside the slide area on Avenida de Santiago. “Without him we wouldn’t be getting any information. . . . We’re certainly not learning anything from the city.”

Davis said the flyers, especially the one titled “Property Tax Refunds,” have been very helpful to many residents.

“Not many people knew to think about the tax issue and reassessing their property,” she said. “He’s really focusing on the issues.”

City spokesman Bret Colson said he is aware of Steiner’s flyers critical of Anaheim.

“He can say whatever he would like to say,” Colson said. “I think what you’re seeing is a tremendously frustrated person looking to vent, and he’s chosen the city. . . . We certainly have sympathy for him.”

Steiner, a part-time movie producer and owner of a video dubbing business, said he did not really intend to become the mouthpiece for his neighbors’ fears and concerns. He finds his newfound celebrity status in the hills amusing.

“Somebody has to do it,” he said. “I guess I’m an activist. My wife sometimes calls me an instigator.”

But the real motivation for his activism is the love he has for his house, which he built seven years ago for his wife and two children.

“To see this happen to our home is sad,” he said. “It’s like a death in the family. It’s funny how a house becomes part of you, like a dog or something.”

He said that when city crews drained the family pool, “it was like the lifeblood being sucked out of our home. That’s when it really hit us.”

Steiner said he has given up on ever returning to his house in the hills. Home for the Steiners is now the office-warehouse in Fullerton.

“We have beds and a kitchen--all the comforts of home without the slide,” Steiner said.

Because of his flyers, he has also become something of a counselor and confidant to many of his neighbors.

A group of five homeowner associations recently asked him, unsuccessfully, to write a letter endorsing a particular attorney to represent the hills. Other residents have told him about plans to walk out on their mortgage payments and be foreclosed on by their banks.

“Some people are seriously talking about walking away from their homes, leaving their mortgage and going somewhere new. Some say they’ll just rent for five or so years,” Steiner said.

Still others, he said, are talking to attorneys about suing the city, the developer or anybody who might be liable for the 25-acre landslide.

As for his plans, Steiner said that he is looking at building a new home in Newport Beach “on flat land.”

In the meantime, Steiner said, he is going to stay on top of the situation in the hills and investigate what the city knew or didn’t know back in the early 1970s when the first homes there were being developed.

According to several environmental impact reports on file with the city, copies of which many residents have collected, geologists for various developers had identified landslides in the Nohl Ranch-Anaheim Hills area as early as 1970.

One report stated that landslides there “range from a few feet across with a volume of less than 500 cubic yards to 700 to 1,400 feet in dimension involving many tens of thousands of cubic yards of debris.”

At the outbreak of the sliding problem in July, city officials maintained that they did not know of potential landslide problems. They further said that the landslide dated back to the Ice Age and was only discovered last April when some residents noticed cracks in the streets and sidewalks.

The slide caused only about an inch of movement between April and the heavy January rains. But in the three weeks since the storms, the soaked hillsides have moved as much as 15 inches in some areas.

Since the discovery of some of the EIRs, city officials have declined to discuss the origin of the slide or previous knowledge of it because of potential litigation.

“Right now we’re in the process of reviewing all the documents with a fine-toothed comb,” said city spokesman Colson. “We really can’t say anything about that.”

That kind of response has infuriated some residents.

Gail Turner, who had to evacuate her home on Rimwood Drive, said that the lack of information coming from city officials “is one of the most frustrating things” about the ordeal.

“They’re not giving us any definite answers,” she said. “Our lives are in limbo.”

Steiner continues to be much harsher on city officials, past and present.

He blames past city councils and department heads for allowing the development of the hills, despite indications that the land was unstable. And he is angry with current city officials for not being more open about the situation.

“They’re really digging their heels in and protecting themselves,” Steiner said. “The saddest thing is they’re lying to us.”