CALABASAS : Quake Damages Cultural Core, 40 Residences

As the San Fernando Valley’s western outpost of earthquake damage, Calabasas was hit hard only at its two-block cultural core, including the historic Leonis Adobe, and about 40 homes throughout the city.

By Tuesday, building officials had inspected nearly 2,000 structures in the semirural town of about 25,000 people. Forty residences were declared unfit to live in, and another 400 sustained enough damage to render parts of them unusable.

Displaced residents may have taken refuge with friends and family or in hotels, City Manager Charles Cate speculated, because no tent communities have been erected in Calabasas.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday opened a relief application center at Calabasas High School, 22855 W. Mulholland Highway, for affected residents of Calabasas, Woodland Hills and nearby areas.

“There were an awful lot of dwellings with cracked chimneys, sidewalks and streets with fissures, and roadblocks pulled away,” Cate said. “But we didn’t have any commercial buildings that suffered more than superficial damage. I guess we can consider ourselves lucky in the overall scheme of things.”

That was small comfort to those who suffered losses.

Ray Phillips, who has spent several decades restoring the Leonis Adobe on the city’s border with Los Angeles, spoke haltingly about cracks expected to keep the landmark closed for the rest of the year.

“There isn’t much left that’s right,” Phillips said of the building, built in 1845. “It’s very bad. It got a bad shaking. The contents survived almost intact, but the structure itself is very damaged.”

The museum’s Plummer House and animal pens are still open for public viewing, he said.

The rest of the city’s historic core, known as Old Calabasas, was shut down last week because of a gas leak that forced the closure of Calabasas Road between Park Granada Boulevard and Mulholland Drive until Friday.

Florence Ross, who lives on Park Esperanza, is one of dozens of Calabasas residents who will spend the rest of this winter without a fireplace because her chimney collapsed.

“The terrible thing is that it was all set to light a fire in the morning,” said Ross, 68. “I had paper wadded up under the grill and logs ready to go. But then the atom bomb went off, the chimney fell down and everything in my house that could move was put asunder.”

Students in the Las Virgenes Unified School District, unlike their counterparts in Los Angeles, missed no school because of the earthquake. Nor was there structural damage to any Las Virgenes school buildings.

“We were very fortunate,” Supt. Albert (Bud) Marley said. “We had some books fall down and some cracked paint. The overall cost to get everything healed should be about $75,000. It’s a different world from L. A.”