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House Condemned, Other Is Evacuated After ‘Minor Slide’

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TIMES STAFF WRITERS

One house was condemned, another evacuated and two more suffered minor damage Wednesday in what authorities called a “minor slide” on Canyon View Road and Buena Vista Way.

Fire and city officials said they didn’t know why the homes slid now, weeks after rainstorms caused another landslide that destroyed several other homes. But the homes damaged Wednesday have recently had sewage and water leakage problems that may have exacerbated the land movement, Battalion Fire Chief Joe McClure said. The two landslides, however, are unrelated, officials said.

Fire and police officials were called to the area at 8:45 a.m. Wednesday by a resident who reported that the street, along with the driveway of a house on Buena Vista Way had “buckled up,” McClure said.

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Inside one house, fire officials found that a 25-foot-long, 8-foot-deep, 6-inch-wide crack practically split the floor, McClure said. The residents had apparently packed up and left the day before, he said.

“This house has to be torn down and will never be lived in again,” the chief said Wednesday as workers boarded up the one-story, light brown wood-siding house.

One street above, the owner of a house on Canyon View Road had to be evacuated when officials found major cracks in and outside of his home. Two other houses on the same street had smaller cracks, but residents were still staying there Wednesday.

The slide does not seem to threaten other homes in the immediate area, McClure said.

David Newcomb, who was evacuated, said he had noticed movement in his house since the first set of storms in January.

“I thought it would just stop settling as soon as things dried up,” said Newcomb, 73, who has lived in the house for more than 40 years. “But, my fireplace was cracking in half, the house was . . . tilting” and there were large cracks under the house.

The Orange County Red Cross placed Newcomb in a hotel for the night.

The homes are about one mile south of the homes on Mystic Lane that were destroyed by landslides in January after days of continuous rain.

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Two of the houses on Mystic Lane slipped from their foundations, while a third tumbled down the hillside and burst into flames. Firefighters last weekend torched what remained of one of the homes to keep keep it from plunging down the hill and causing damage to other houses.

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