CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Anaheim Hills Homeowners See Their Dreams Slip Away : Some in landslide area may have to walk out on their mortgages. Others have become neighborhood activists.

For hundreds of residents in this upscale community, the future is as uncertain as the ground under their homes.

It is hard to plan anything, they say, when your once-quiet neighborhood is being held hostage by a slow-moving, 25-acre landslide.

“Our lives are in limbo,” said Gail Turner, 41, one of more than 100 residents who had to evacuate from 45 houses four weeks ago. “There’s nothing we can do but wait and see what’s going to happen. It’s torture.”

Pam Dogris, 32, who lives outside the evacuated area but in the path of the slide, agrees.

“Sometimes I wish that it would just rain and rain and rain so the hill would come down once and for all,” said Dogris, who works out of her home selling men’s ties. “That way we could get on with our lives and start over.”

But a quick resolution to the problem in this neighborhood about 12 miles east of Disneyland seems unlikely. Geologists say it could be months or years before the creeping landslide stops moving.

Last week’s storms did not help matters and, as rains continued to saturate the hill, city crews worked feverishly to pump water out of the ground in an attempt to stabilize the earth.

Meanwhile, hundreds of residents living on and around the landslide are seeing the values of their homes plummet. Some are considering walking out on their mortgage payments, many do not know if they can afford to make repairs, and others have become activists on behalf of their neighbors. They interview attorneys and pore over city planning documents to determine who is responsible for building on an ancient landslide.

Through it all, residents of different races, income levels and backgrounds have grown closer together, some talking to their next-door neighbors for the first time.

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Anaheim Hills, a part of the city of Anaheim, is a peaceful, family community of middle- to upper-class residents living in houses worth $300,000 to $1.5 million. People from firefighters to movie producers call the neighborhood home.

With vistas of the surrounding mountains and cities, the community is considered one of the nicest places to live in Orange County--at least it was, until the slide occurred.

Residents first noticed that the ground was moving in April when cracks started appearing in streets and sidewalks. During the next nine months, it barely moved an inch and was not a grave concern to most.

All that changed in January after two weeks of rains soaked the rolling hillsides and accelerated the slippage. In the span of seven days, the slide moved more than 14 inches in some places, splitting foundations, breaking apart walls and cracking open swimming pools as if they were eggshells.

By Jan. 18, the day of the evacuation order, residents, city officials and geologists were in a panic.

Everyone, that is, except Darlene Denton.

Like a captain going down with a sinking ship, Denton refused to leave her home, which is worth more than $1.2 million. “I think the city is overreacting,” she said as her neighbors packed their belongings and a city crew drained her pool.

More than a month later, Denton’s home is still standing and she believes she made the right choice.

“I’m glad I stayed. But I feel a little bit like I’m on my own little island, and what good is a house on an island if there’s nobody around you?” Denton, 58, said.

She said that she and her husband, a retired businessman, had planned before the slide to sell the house and settle elsewhere for their retirement. “I guess those plans are off now,” she said.

Unlike Denton, Gerald M. Steiner, 51, was packing his bags the minute he and his family were asked to leave. The cracks running up his driveway were enough to persuade him that there was a problem.

When city crews drained his pool, “it was like they sucked the lifeblood out of the home,” he said. Watching his $1.2-million home slowly breaking apart was like witnessing “a death in the family,” Steiner said.

Instead of waiting for the inevitable, he decided to start a one-man campaign to educate his neighbors and find out who was responsible. He gathered 20-year-old environmental impact reports that he says seem to indicate that the city and developers knew of potential landslide problems before the homes were built.

Using his office computer, Steiner composed “open letters” to tell his neighbors what he learned, laying blame on the city’s doorstep. The residents, who are searching for any information about their predicament, eagerly read his dispatches.

Last week, “Landslide Update No. 6” was mailed to hundreds of readers, and No. 7 is in the works, he said.

Steiner, his wife and daughter are living in an office warehouse in Fullerton where his video-dubbing business is based. He said he has plans to build a new home “on some flat land” in Newport Beach.

Steiner said he and some of his neighbors who own custom homes at the top of the hill have enough money to buy houses somewhere else to start over. But those who live toward the bottom of the slide are not so fortunate.

A majority have invested their life savings in their homes and do not know how they are going to survive, especially because most insurance companies exclude landslide coverage from their policies.

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Gail and Jeff Turner put everything into their $320,000 home. Jeff Turner, 37, a firefighter with the city of Downey, has done a lot of work on the home himself, adding a dinette and new windows.

“It’s a lot of money, time, sweat and tears in the home,” he said. “We’d like to stay there.”

The question is whether they can afford to.

“I don’t make $100,000 a year,” said Jeff Turner, who is the sole breadwinner for his wife and two young daughters. “Our budget was pretty tight; there wasn’t a whole lot left for frills.”

He fears that the family may have to walk away from the mortgage because he cannot cover rent and a house payment at the same time.

In the short term, the Turners have applied for federal financial assistance, made available by President Clinton’s disaster declaration Feb. 3. “Hopefully we’ll get something to help pay the rent while we’re evacuated,” Gail Turner said.

The couple said they hope that some sort of lawsuit against the city, the developer or somebody might help them solve their financial woes.

So does fellow resident Michael Clayton, who formed the group Communicators in Action about a week after the slide.

Clayton, 49, an employee relations manager with Ford Motor Co., moved his family from Detroit to Anaheim Hills in March, a month before the first cracks appeared in the sidewalks. Just down from his house, a large fissure in the street has been identified as the “toe,” or the bottom, of the landslide.

“It’s a scary situation,” he said.

Clayton said he started the group because “nobody seemed to be stepping forward to take a leadership role on behalf of the homeowners.”

So far, he has organized several well-attended residents meetings to discuss their plight and possible legal remedies. At least nine highly respected law firms have made presentations at the gatherings.

The one bright spot, Clayton said, has been meeting his neighbors.

“I’ve learned that I have a lot of very nice neighbors,” he said. “Too bad it took something like this to get to know them.”