Financial Roadblock : Lack of Cleanup Funds Leaves Residents Isolated by a Landslide

Six decades of paying taxes, and Frank Azcarate is getting impatient.

“What else are taxes for, if not for things like this?” he said of the delay in clearing a landslide that has shut off his closest route to Santa Paula.

For the second time in two years, tons of falling rocks and earth have closed South Mountain Road, from three quarters of a mile south of Santa Paula to Balcom Canyon Road. Officials are saying cleanup funds are unavailable, just as they did after a slide in 1993.

“It’s just a Mickey Mouse deal,” said Azcarate, 74, who now must drive about 15 miles farther to get to Santa Paula. “When I was a boy, they used to (clean up landslides) with horses.”

Beverly Martinez, like scores of others along this rural mountain road, is angry.

“I think they should try to find the money,” Martinez, 33, said of budget constraints that authorities say might delay reopening the road until spring.

Until then, residents east of the slide above the Santa Clara River must reach Santa Paula through Fillmore. What was only a few miles away before--stores, work, doctors--now is 15 to 20 miles away, a delay of 30 minutes or more.

In addition, some residents are worried about being isolated during a wildfire, their escape shut off by the road closure.

“They were out there all the time cleaning the road, cleaning out the ditches,” said Joan Robison, 56, “and now when there’s an emergency . . . they say they don’t have the money.”

In their own ways--some stoically, some vocally--those who live along this drowsy stretch of orchards and oil rigs are feeling abandoned all over again.

They might have rustic silence, sweeping views of the mountains and ranch houses lost in groves of citrus and avocado trees. But they also have a nearby hillside that literally is falling apart, always staying a landslide ahead of a financially strapped county road department.

“There’s not a person I’ve talked to who isn’t (angry),” said Robison, a 24-year resident.

Mandy Deramo, 30, a mother of two who now must take her daughters to private school in Santa Paula the long way said “I hope they don’t just fix what’s on the road (this time), but that they fix what’s causing the problem, up there on the mountain.”

It all began April 3, 1993, when spring rains caused as much as 160,000 tons of 22-million-year-old sediment to cascade onto South Mountain Road. Eleven weeks later, after county officials cast about for the necessary cleanup funds, they reopened the road.

It could take longer this time.

“We don’t have the funding to pay the contractors right now,” said Butch Britt, head of the Ventura County transportation department.

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Like the larger one last year, the Sept. 8 slide left thousands of tons of earth and boulders hanging precariously from the cliff. Cleanup crews must work from above, gingerly nudging the loose material down to the road before trucking it away.

“If we can’t get up there working before the rainy season . . . it’d be unlikely that we’d be able to work up there until late next spring,” Britt said.

County officials, who estimate the cleanup cost at about $200,000, hope they can persuade the federal government that the landslide is earthquake-related, triggered by an aftershock of the Jan. 17 Northridge temblor.

If so, the federal government would help the county pay for the work, in which case the road could possibly be reopened in about two months, Britt said.

If not, said county Supervisor Maggie Kildee, whose 3rd District includes the Santa Paula area, “then we’d have to find other sources (of funding) and they’re very few and far between.”

County geologist Jim Fisher, whose preliminary report indeed links the slide to an aftershock, noted that the earth movement apparently occurred after a 3.1 quake at 2:56 a.m. near San Fernando.

Although the 6.8 Northridge earthquake was more than a thousand times stronger, it was not enough to cause the slide, Fisher said. “Perhaps (the Sept. 8) aftershock was the final, ultimate trigger, the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.

One of the first to see the tumbling rocks, Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Mayorga, said the bulk of the slide came down about two hours after the aftershock.

Mayorga said the scene was eerie: the debris piling up against his cruiser, the dust turned red by the car’s rotating lights.

“It was the more awesome thing I’ve seen in my entire life,” Mayorga said.

Louise Taylor, who has lived on South Mountain Road since the 1920s, is unimpressed with such things--and unconvinced that an earthquake caused the slide.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” said Taylor, who lives on the Santa Paula side of the slide. “And (slides are) constantly happening . . . It’s something we’ve always contended with.”

What troubles many residents is that the latest slide, unlike last year’s, comes at the beginning of the fall fire season. They fear that a massive blaze approaching from the east could block their only escape routes, South Mountain and Balcom Canyon roads.

To the west, now corralled by a chain-link fence to keep people away, is the slide.

Martinez, who is eight months pregnant with her first child, is particularly upset that her twice-weekly trips to her doctor in Ventura--and ultimately to the hospital for the delivery--are now up to 50 minutes longer.

“She’s having a difficult pregnancy,” said 37-year-old Greg Martinez, her husband. “So it kind of makes me mad that they don’t want to do anything about (the slide), and that we have to go out of our way to go to the doctor.”

Tony Deramo, 29, a cook at Carrows restaurant in Ojai, now must leave for work a half-hour earlier each day, at 4 a.m., because of the detour. He also is spending twice as much on gas.

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The same goes for Oscar Avila, 34. Employed at an oil-industry supplier in Ventura, Avila now must take Balcom Canyon Road to work. But this is a slower route with at least two hairpin curves, including one with a 10-m.p.h. advisory sign, as the road snakes through the hills.

At night, the two-lane road is especially treacherous, Avila said.

Bob Brownie, a county engineer who was inspecting the site, looked up at the scarred cavities left by last year’s slide and the slide on Sept. 8. Halfway up is a gaping fissure that angled its way up the cliff while an oak tree, teetering in its loosened bed, seems poised to come down.

“I don’t even feel comfortable standing here,” he said. “It looks like it’s stabilized, but you never really can tell.”

To the east on South Mountain Road, Melanie Haug had driven up to her mailbox after completing six errands, rather than the one or two she otherwise would have done.

“It’s more a matter of preparing now,” said Haug, 37, an emergency room nurse who commutes to Los Angeles. “It’s more like the ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ where you go to town only once a week.”

A newcomer to the community, Haug added: “I suppose if I still lived in Palos Verdes, (I would) be furious, stressed out. But that’s just the trade-off of living here . . . You sort of have a different attitude when you live in the country.”