5 San Clemente Homes Ruined in Massive Slide

Five ocean-bluff homes were declared in ruins, and Amtrak service for nearly 5,000 commuters was disrupted Tuesday after a massive landslide the night before sent tons of rubble crashing 75 feet onto Pacific Coast Highway and the railroad tracks.

“It sounded like a cross between a bomb and an earthquake,” said Diane Ward, who lives across the street from the affected homes. “The glass was cracking and wood was popping for at least 15 minutes.”

City officials said late Tuesday that four other high-priced houses along La Ventana are in danger of slipping as continuing rain further weakens the storm-soaked bluff.

“There is still danger of more slides, it might even break back as far as the middle of the street,” Mayor Truman Benedict warned. “I’ve lived here 44 years and I’ve never seen that much bluff come off.”

The mass of falling earth landed near the beachfront home of Lana Schaefer, who has lived on Beach Road with her family for eight years.

“We heard it all come down last night, but it wasn’t until we woke up at dawn that we saw all the devastation,” she said. “The magnitude of this just stuns me.”

The slide buried 100 feet of railroad track under dirt and debris, forcing Amtrak officials to hire buses to shuttle passengers on the Los Angeles-to-San Diego line to stations where they could bypass the closed section of track and catch a train for their destinations.

Commuter rail service will be disrupted at least until Friday, officials said, as many harried commuters tried to bear up under the inconvenience and delays.

“Can I use four-letter words?” commuter David J. Miller replied when asked about his morning rail trip from Del Mar to Los Angeles.

Miller, who works for a motion picture distribution company, said his usual hour-and-40-minute commute took longer than three hours because he had to take a shuttle bus from Del Mar to Orange County.

“It’s very inconvenient and very hectic,” he said. “It just makes you realize how reliant we’ve become on the rail system.”

Another commuter considered himself fortunate compared to the people whose homes were damaged or destroyed.

“That’s a tragedy,” said Rufus Young, an environmental lawyer from Rancho Sante Fe in San Diego County. “Our inconvenience is minor.”

Meanwhile, city officials from San Clemente and Dana Point conferred Tuesday with representatives of Caltrans and the Sante Fe Railroad, which owns the tracks, to decide how to clean up the damage and stabilize the remaining cliffs.

Dennie Jue, city engineer for Dana Point, said it is impossible now to estimate the amount of damage.

When the landslide struck about 10:45 p.m. Monday, part of one home plunged down the cliff and four others were rendered a total loss and must be demolished, according to Mayor Benedict.

Nobody was hurt, but frightened residents of the 2800 block of La Ventana fled when they heard the ground under their houses start to give way.

In the hour after the slide hit, residents stood dazed in the street, watching authorities evacuate six houses on La Ventana, an exclusive hilltop neighborhood with stunning ocean views. Homes on the bluffs generally cost from $500,000 to $1 million, according to residents.

“This is a shock, a real shock. I retired in this place 18 years ago,” said Russell Mills as he watched police rope off his home. Mills said he and his wife “heard the popping and cracking and we got out of there in a hurry.”

City officials and geologists said they couldn’t predict whether there would be more damage but added that the next storm could only make the situation more precarious.

“We’re still trying to assess the damage,” said David Peter, a geologist with Peter & Associates. “Rain certainly wouldn’t help the picture.”

Orange County will have to brace for yet another storm, expected early Friday, and a second storm behind that one, giving little chance for saturated hillsides to dry out, said Dean Jones, a meteorologist with WeatherData, which provides forecasts for The Times.

“These storms are coming through every three or four days and they’re not giving the ground sufficient chance to dry out. The next storm could produce a bunch of mudslides,” Jones said.

Sunny skies are expected today, Jones said, but clouds are expected by Thursday, with the chance of rain increasing Friday morning.

“It will be a stronger storm than Tuesday’s. Although it’s tamed down a little bit from what it was on Monday, it could be trying to gain more energy,” Jones said.

On Tuesday, only up to a third of an inch of rain fell in Orange County. Santa Ana reported a quarter of an inch, and both Anaheim and Newport Beach had 0.30 of an inch of rain.

Tuesday’s storm brought the season’s rainfall total to nearly 21 inches, far above last year’s 9.78 inches at this time of year. The normal amount is 8.84 inches.

The affected section of Pacific Coast Highway, which is in Dana Point, has been closed by the city since Jan. 16 because of the landslide threat. Dana Point traffic engineers say it will remain that way indefinitely. While the stricken homes are located in San Clemente, the face of the bluff is in Dana Point.

After a small landslide occurred in the area earlier this week, geologists warned residents that the collapse of the bluffs was likely. Two of the La Ventana homes had already been evacuated as a precaution.

“My geologist told me this has the potential to be the biggest slide ever in this city,” said Peter Shikli, who lost about half his home Monday night, “and it sure looks like it is.”

City officials and utility workers were up all night trying to gauge damage caused by the collapse.

“This is a major failure,” said Andy Anderson, emergency services coordinator for Dana Point. “There are several thousands of cubic yards of material on Pacific Coast Highway and across the railroad tracks into the Beach Road area. That’s a considerable amount.”

Chunks of concrete and rock up to seven feet wide were among huge mounds of earth up to a dozen feet high on Pacific Coast Highway. Up to 300 feet of highway was covered by the slide, officials said.

Families rendered homeless by the slide either stayed with neighbors or found shelter with relatives. At least one resident stayed at a local hotel that offered free lodging to slide victims.

Tears running down his cheeks, Dick Ronne said Monday night that he was mainly concerned about finding a place for his dogs, five small white canines that barked frantically from inside his car.

“Look at how upset they are,” Ronne said. “I hope we all can find some place to live until (city officials) let us go back.”

San Clemente officials and geologists said the earth movement was the largest in the city since the Verde Canyon slide in 1983, which destroyed 10 homes.

Unlike the slide in 1983, the most recent disaster affected people living outside Orange County.

On Tuesday, most of the northbound Amtrak commuters, who make up the bulk of the morning riders, were provided with shuttle service by bus to either the San Juan Capistrano depot, which is about four miles north of the slide area, or Santa Ana, said Clifford Black, Amtrak’s director of public affairs in Washington.

Black said Amtrak managed to get commuters to their destinations Tuesday morning with “delays of no more than 30 minutes, in most cases.”

“Fortunately, we had plenty of advance warning,” said Black, who added that Amtrak was notified of a “major slide” by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department about 11:15 Monday night.

“That gave us six hours of lead time to round up buses,” Black said. “People who showed up at train stations with ticket in hand were greeted by a bus at roughly the scheduled train time and taken to their destination or to a transfer point where they got on a train.”

The shuttle will continue until the slide is cleaned up and removed from the tracks, Black said. “The current estimate is that it could be Friday before we restore regular train service,” he said.

The problem is not only cleaning material off the train tracks. Officials are also concerned about how tampering with the toe of the landslide might affect the rest of the bluff top, said Jue.

“The concern we have is if we move the debris from the tracks, what happens to the slope behind it,” Jue said. “It doesn’t appear that the debris is holding up the slope, but we have to determine that for sure before we do anything.”

Times staff writer David Reyes and correspondent Anna Cekola contributed to this report.