Cover Story : A Mountain of Tears : Neither Fires Nor Floods Dampen Spirit of Those Who Want to Live in Las Flores--and Nowhere Else

Name a year and they can name a disaster. There was the 1970 wildfire. The 1984 mudslides. The 1992 flood. And, worst of all, last November’s firestorm.

For decades, residents of Malibu’s Las Flores Canyon have managed to overcome what nature dished out.

They built retaining walls in the face of floods, planted vegetation to ward off landslides, cleared brush and installed sprinkler systems to protect their houses against fire.

But now that entire mountains have been denuded by the area’s worst wildfire in memory, several hundred canyon residents have ever more reason to worry about floods, mudslides and debris flows.

“It’s like living next to a time bomb,” said Valerie Titus, who sleeps on the living room floor whenever it rains for fear the hillside behind her apartment will crash through the bedroom wall. Two years ago, she lived a few hundred yards up the canyon when a raging Las Flores Creek swept through her triplex and destroyed her possessions. Last month she lost her car in a mudslide.

Yet, like many Las Flores residents, Titus has no desire to leave. “Even with all its troubles, this is a remarkably beautiful place to live,” she said.

A rugged gash on the coastal landscape, Las Flores Canyon stretches for more than a mile from north to south, hemmed by mountains on three sides and by the Pacific Ocean at its lower end.

The canyon’s namesake creek, which once brimmed with salmon and steelhead trout, is a magnet for deer and other wildlife. Its shady glens and ocean vistas have made it popular with writers, artists and others looking for solitude.

But there is a price: Calamity seems never far away.

This is by no means Malibu’s only ecological trouble spot.

A 1983 landslide at nearby Big Rock Mesa damaged or destroyed 240 homes, causing $97 million in damage. During heavy rains, muddy debris from eroding bluffs often force the closure of Pacific Coast Highway and inundate expensive beach houses.

But Las Flores Canyon’s precarious geology, coupled with its popularity as a locale for million-dollar country homes, places it in a league of its own when it comes to natural disasters.

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The lower canyon lies at the foot of a giant landslide, which in 1984 gobbled up eight hillside homes and wiped out half a mile of Rambla Pacifico Road, cutting off the only direct route to Pacific Coast Highway for 550 residents on the canyon’s west rim. The slide changed the course of Las Flores Creek, shoving it 60 yards to the east. Engineers say the slide still poses a threat to the creek and to Las Flores Canyon Road, the only artery leading out of the canyon.

Based on federal flood insurance maps, officials say 10 properties in the lower part of the canyon that were destroyed by the fire--and at least eight that weren’t--are in an area likely to be severely flooded during prolonged torrential rains.

To the east, another 50 properties on Las Flores Mesa, whose residents must traverse the canyon to escape fire, are in danger of isolation if the canyon were to flood.

And officials are concerned that it will. Because of November’s fires, soil experts say the area could face increased danger from floods and mudslides for the next eight years. It may take that long, they say, for the vegetation--vital for absorbing and dispersing rain--to regenerate.

In the fire’s aftermath, Malibu’s elected officials have hurriedly begun seeking solutions to the hazards. And they hope to persuade the federal government to help foot the bill. Depending on what is attempted, costs could range from $8 million to tens of millions of dollars.

The effort, moreover, is controversial.

Residents, including fire victims eager to rebuild in the canyon, heaped scorn on a study released this week that, among other things, suggested the part of the canyon in a flood plain be declared unsafe for habitation.

“We’re here because the canyon is a great place to live,” said Susan Shaw, who, with her partner, lost a creek-side home to the fire and wants to rebuild. “We don’t want to be told that our way of life is expendable.”

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Bad luck with the elements aside, Las Flores Canyon has had other troubles.

To keep outsiders off his sprawling rancho that stretched along the entire Malibu coast, pioneer settler Frederick H. Rindge installed gates at the mouth of the canyon in 1894. Travelers between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara needed permission to pass.

The gates were the focal point of a court battle between Rindge’s widow and the state that lasted 22 years and was aimed at protecting Rancho Malibu as a private preserve.

The dispute was slow to end, even after the U.S. Supreme Court granted the state an easement through the ranch to build what became Pacific Coast Highway.

In 1923, when state employees arrived to begin work on the road, they were met at Las Flores by 40 armed ranch guards who kept the workers off the property for three days. The highway finally opened in 1929.

The canyon itself lies just outside the Rindge domain, a wild, out-of-the-way paradise that had been claimed early in the century by a group of well-to-do bankers, lawyers and businessmen--many of them from Pasadena and Glendale--known as the Uplifters.

The Uplifters were weekend warriors who built small cabins along the creek for their hunting and fishing expeditions.

During World War I, the group formed a trust that claimed title to much of the canyon. The road was brought up from the coast in the early 1920s, and the cabins were soon replaced with more luxurious timber lodges.

But the early settlers soon learned of the area’s unforgiving environment.

By the late 1930s, the three dozen or so lodges that had been built there were gone--lost to fire, flood and mudslides, said James J. C. Cartemanche, whose Uplifter grandfather and great-uncle were among Las Flores’ original settlers.

Cartemanche and his wife, Cornelia, can attest to the fragility of life in the canyon.

They live next door to his 81-year-old father on a narrow ridge top that had to be blasted with dynamite to make room for the two houses Cartemanche’s ancestors built after starting to homestead there in 1908. Cartemanche’s sister and brother-in-law, who lived in the gorge below him, lost their house during the November fire. The Cartemanches came within a whisker of losing theirs.

“If you filled the train yard at Union Station with locomotives and revved up the engines, that’s how the firestorm sounded when it came through,” Cartemanche said.

Despite officials’ pleas that they evacuate, the couple rode out the fire with three U.S. Forestry Service firefighters who refused to leave them behind.

They lay next to a concrete wall and doused themselves with water from garbage cans to ward off the searing heat, then stamped out the embers that Cartemanche insists would have surely ignited the compound had they not been there.

“Our entire family’s history is here,” he said. “We had too much of our lives invested, emotionally and otherwise, to consider leaving.”

On Las Flores Mesa, where the fire destroyed all but a few of the 50 homes, including that of the late singer Roy Orbison, residents are no less determined to stay.

“The best years of my life have been right here,” said playwright Jerome Lawrence, 78, whose chalet, once a venue for literary conferences and playwriting workshops, burned to the ground. “I wouldn’t think of leaving.”

Among his losses were signed first editions by friends Dorothy Parker and Tennessee Williams, an art collection that included a Picasso, two Degas, a Matisse and a Chagall, and the Steinway piano that Vladimir Horowitz played and Judy Garland leaned against while crooning at one of his parties.

A circular staircase modeled on the steps climbed by Angela Lansbury in the musical “Mame,” written by Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, lay shriveled in what was once his living room. He plans to incorporate the staircase as a poolside ornament when he rebuilds.

Even those who say they may go elsewhere admit to a difficult choice.

“I have to weigh my love for this place against the dangers of living here,” said Cynthia Salisbury, who has lost two Las Flores Mesa homes to fire in her 16 years there.

In November, Salisbury and her two adult children were forced to flee on foot down a steep hill to the coast highway, where firefighters used ropes to pull them to safety just ahead of advancing flames.

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As if it were nature’s way of evening the score, fire damage inflicted on the hillsides now contributes to the misery of residents whose homes were spared last November.

On the day of the fire, Gary Silverston paid the owner of a speed boat $100 to take him from Marina del Rey to Las Flores, knowing that Pacific Coast Highway had been cordoned off. He swam ashore and ran a quarter of a mile to turn on the rooftop sprinkler system he believes saved his home.

But despite building his own retaining wall, a rainstorm last month sent mud and rock crashing into his daughter’s bedroom and left 18 inches of debris in his garage.

“Before, when it rained we were high and dry,” he said. “Now, we’ve got 12 1/2 acres of hillside trying to come down on top of us.”

Silverston’s experience is the kind that worries local officials, who acknowledge that erosion control devices installed in the canyon since the fire would be inadequate in torrential rains.

“We’ve been fortunate so far,” city engineer John P. Clement said, referring to the relatively dry winter.

Now there is much debate about the canyon’s future.

Canyon residents, fearful of being forced to leave and others afraid they will not be allowed to rebuild, are upset with a suggestion by consultants that Malibu consider acquiring properties along the creek by condemnation, if necessary, as a way to reduce future risk.

The idea’s supporters say acquisitions would not only remove residents from harm’s way, but would allow the creek to be dredged, Las Flores Canyon Road to be raised safely above the flood plain and an earthen dam to be built to buttress the troublesome Rambla Pacifico slide.

If that were to happen, proponents say, it might even be possible to rebuild the part of Rambla Pacifico Road wiped out by the ’84 slide.

The dispute has sharply divided property owners in the canyon and their neighbors on the west rim.

“The Rambla people have wanted us out for years,” said Shaw, the former creek-side resident who wants to rebuild. “They seem awfully eager to pick over our remains.”

Rim residents offer another perspective.

“This is a one-of-a-kind chance to rebuild that road,” said Dan Logan, whose group, Reopen Rambla, filed a lawsuit in 1989 blaming Los Angeles County for faulty construction and maintenance of the road and seeking to force the county to rebuild it. The county denied liability and said rebuilding the road would be too costly. The case is scheduled for trial in July.

Until now, the city of Malibu has managed to steer clear of the issue.

Mindful of the residents’ lawsuit and anxious to avoid assuming any liability of its own for repairing the slide, Malibu used an obscure law to exclude the road from its city limits when it incorporated in 1991.

Now, however, with local officials eager to take advantage of Malibu having been declared a federal disaster area after the fire, the scenario for making the canyon safer has come to include possible solutions for the slide area. Malibu’s City Council expects to settle on a plan possibly as early as next month.

Some observers, including Madelyn Glickfeld, a member of the state Coastal Commission whose Las Flores home was destroyed by the fire, believe public acquisition of some properties in the canyon is inescapable to avoid further calamity in the next few years.

“My concern is that some people (in the canyon) still don’t get it,” Glickfeld said, referring to the potential danger. “Unless there’s a will to mitigate the hazards properly, the worst may be still to come.”

Such talk is no comfort to Virginia Armstrong, 76, who for 30 years has operated the Malibu Carden School next to the creek in what was once an old firehouse.

From her office window, she sees a playground where Martin Sheen used to shoot hoops with sons Charlie and Emilio; a picket fence where Cary Grant often waited for his daughter in the afternoons, and the concrete slab where her own daughter, now 36, inscribed long ago: “Lani Was Here.”

“I have former pupils who stop me in the market and say their years in the canyon were the happiest of their lives,” Armstrong said. “We would surely hate to leave this place.”

On the Cover

A view of Las Flores Canyon from the patio of a Deerpath Lane home destroyed in the November firestorm. Below is the crumbling hillside that resulted in the closing of Rambla Pacifico Road. Las Flores Canyon has been prone to fires, floods and mudslides. But residents, drawn to its quiet beauty, insist on remaining.