Liability Debated Long Before Landslide : La Conchita: Residents and the county differ over who should pay. The owners of the hillside were silent.

Even before the Saturday landslide that dumped tons of mud on homes in the sleepy community of La Conchita, the debate was on over who will be ultimately responsible for the damages.

Not us, said owners of the homes directly below, who pointed to county officials and the neighboring ranch where the landslide is.

Not us, said county officials who allowed homes to be built between the 1920s and 1980s in the shadow of the ever-changing coastal cliff, pointing instead to the builders.

No comment, said operators of the cliff-top La Conchita Ranch, which owns the hillside that came sliding down Saturday into homes overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway just north of Ventura.

The slide Saturday, which destroyed at least nine homes, came as sheriff’s and fire officials were still drafting a joint disaster plan in case the 600,000-ton hillside broke loose.

And as the threat of landslide turned into a muddy reality Saturday, the damage to property made the La Conchita slide look more and more like a potential mini-replay of 1983’s costly Big Rock Mesa landslide in Malibu.

The Big Rock Mesa disaster cost Los Angeles County and state agencies millions of dollars.

After a massive landslide destroyed or damaged more than 250 homes atop the mesa, owners filed lawsuits alleging that Los Angeles County and other agencies knew of and failed to stop neighborhood drainage problems that caused the slide.

The first Big Rock Mesa suit against Los Angeles County to reach trial failed. An appeals court ruled that the county could not be held liable for damages merely for approving a private housing development.

Los Angeles attorney William W. Vaughn successfully represented the county through the appeals process in that first case. He argued that Los Angeles County could not be held responsible under any legal theory for having approved the area for residential use.

“After all,” Vaughn said last week, “the county didn’t build the houses. The county didn’t build the subdivision. The county said, ‘If you want to take the risk, go ahead.’ It’s ridiculous to hold the government responsible for what these private citizens decided to do.”

While the state Supreme Court upheld the appeal court’s decision in 1988, it permitted other claims by the remaining Malibu property owners that ultimately resulted in a large payout by Los Angeles County.

Superior Court Judge Maurice Hogan Jr. that year ordered construction of the biggest courtroom in the United States, a 24,000-square-foot hall inside the Hollywood Palladium to accommodate more than 275 attorneys who would be handling the suits.

And less than a year later, attorneys for Los Angeles County, the California Department of Transportation and insurance companies hammered out a settlement with homeowners’ attorneys, agreeing to pay $97 million to 256 owners whose houses had collapsed, cracked or slid off their foundations.

Ventura County Counsel James McBride argued last week, before Saturday’s slide, that the La Conchita situation leaves far less room for county liability than did the Big Rock case.

“The issue, which (the homeowners) don’t really seem to understand, is a private property issue,” McBride said.

“We have many of these situations around the county which are caused by acts of God: rain, earthquakes, fires and floods causing creeks to wash out property, landslides that cover property and things like that,” he said. “The role of government isn’t to come in and solve all the problems that happen on private property.”

He pointed instead to the disaster plan that the sheriff’s and fire departments began drafting in October after the county warned La Conchita residents that the landslide was becoming active again.

“Our role is to provide the best information that we have to the public out there,” he said. “There is no legal obligation to cure this, even if there were a cure.”

Told of the slide Saturday, McBride said the county’s position had not changed.

“We’ve done everything we can to assist and inform and notify,” he said. “The people were well educated and were well aware that this could happen.”

The landslide Saturday came as no surprise to most people.

The steep slopes bordering the coastal enclave of 190 houses in La Conchita have been slipping for about 23,000 years, geologists say.

Landslides have destroyed property at least twice this century in the area, said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Richard Purnell.

In 1989, the moving earth forced the county to condemn one buckled house at the eastern end of Vista del Rincon and order it torn down.

And, Purnell said, “Research through newspaper articles indicated that some time after the turn of the century there had been a catastrophic failure that resulted in several deaths. And 1,000 feet of track was damaged” on the nearby Southern Pacific rail line, he said.

Senior Sheriff’s Deputy Darryl Dunn spent months interviewing residents, conferring with geologists and mapping the hillside prior to Saturday’s slide.

He even built a meticulously detailed scale model of the neighborhood, with the active slide area outlined in red ribbon and the most endangered houses marked with red pushpins.

Lt. Haskell Chandler, Dunn’s boss, also told The Times last week that fire and sheriff’s officials were hammering out final details of an emergency plan in the event of a slide like Saturday’s, including emergency assignments, evacuation schedules and chains of command. The plan was aimed at covering all contingencies--whether the hillside crumbled slowly or all at once, Chandler said.

But La Conchita residents said they were angry that the county was planning only for disaster, not prevention.

“They have a wonderful body-bag plan,” said resident Mary Lou Olson. “But I think they have a responsibility for public safety. . . . The county can force the ranch to do something to stabilize or eliminate the problem.”

But removing all the earth that threatened the homes before Saturday’s slide could have cost $10 million to $30 million, by various estimates.

And several county officials said that the owners of La Conchita Ranch Corp. did not have that money.

David Orr, owner of the ranch, declined to be interviewed last week on the issue of potential liability.

La Conchita homeowners said even before the slide that they blamed the county for having let the situation develop in the first place.

It allowed landowners to build homes near an active geological hazard, they said. And the county allowed La Conchita Ranch in the late 1970s to install an irrigation system in citrus and avocado groves atop the cliff that homeowners said has steadily lubricated the slide area with thousands of gallons of water.

“I feel like the county was derelict in its responsibility by allowing an operation up there where the people next door are going to be affected by it,” homeowner Harold Carver, 76, said last week, predicting the slide.

Olson said the county gave no warning of the landslide danger when she and her husband began building their house 13 years ago.

At the time of the Big Rock Mesa slide, the Olsons dismissed any fears of a similar event because they were building near rolling slopes, not a sharp cliff, she said.

“We went to every one of the county agencies--building and safety, planning, zoning, environmental health,” said Olson, 46, part owner of a Ventura bed and bath shop, who was the most vocal resident calling for county help before Saturday’s slide.

“We asked every department, ‘Is it safe to build? Is the hill stable?’ And they said, ‘No problem,’ ” she recalled. “Unfortunately, I don’t have it in writing. I just trusted them.”

But McBride, the county counsel, said last week that none of these charges holds true because:

Landowners can manage agricultural property however they choose. Developers, not government officials, are ultimately responsible for the stability of the land they build on.

And, McBride said, the county had no obligation to remove natural hazards from private land.

“Those issues are really viewed primarily as between adjacent landowners,” McBride said Saturday.

The county already requires builders in La Conchita to do geological studies on individual lots before it will grant building permits there, said Deputy County Public Works Director John Crowley, who was in charge of monitoring the slide potential for his department.

The county is responsible only to see that the streets and flood channels are kept clear and safe, he said.

“It’s really an issue between the landowners and the ranch,” Crowley said. “If they feel they’ve been threatened by something the ranch has done, they need to sue the ranch.”

Meanwhile, even before Saturday’s slide, the housing market in all of La Conchita had suffered drastically from the publicity about a landslide that threatened only a few of its homes.

“Even before the hill slid it would have been difficult to sell anything in the area,” said Gorden Saue, a Ventura realtor who handles some La Conchita properties. “Now it’s going to be impossible to sell at almost any price.”

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La Conchita Landslide

At least nine houses in La Conchita were crushed when a wall of mud came tumbling down behind Vista del Rincon Drive. A portion of a hillside nearly a third of a mile long and 600 feet wide had been threatening the seaside enclave for months.