La Conchita Braces for Another Series of Storms to Hit Area : Weather: Unless crews can reduce stress of a huge pond atop the sliding hillside, rains forecast to begin as soon as today could spell disaster.

An avalanche of rock and mud continued to inch down a La Conchita hillside Tuesday, as residents scurried to retrieve their belongings from threatened houses and emergency crews braced for the onslaught of storms building on the horizon.

Soil engineers will focus today on draining a 40-foot-wide pond of rainwater collected 300 feet up the slope that has already crushed nine dwellings in the seaside community north of Ventura. They want to unplug the pool before rainfall expected to hit as early as today adds more runoff and weight to the soggy, unstable hillside.

“If we could get rid of the water, it would improve the stability of the hillside,” said Jim Fisher, a consulting geologist.

Unless crews can reduce the weight and stress, the 600,000-ton slide could continue to march into La Conchita, destroying homes in its path.

Geologists also worry about fissures in an adjacent sage-covered hillside just up the coast that could trigger an even larger slide than the one Saturday.

“There is growing concern about the section to the left of the major slide, with cracks resembling what the major slide looked like several weeks ago,” said Ventura County sheriff’s spokesman Lee Morris.

At a meeting Tuesday night with La Conchita residents, Robert Anderson, a geologist for the county, also expressed concern about a landslide in the adjacent area. “Right now, we’re approaching it like it’s a high possibility.”

Forecasters with the National Weather Service predicted that a series of storms will begin moving over the county as early as this afternoon, bringing up to an inch of rain by Thursday night. Rain is expected to continue falling through Saturday.

“It’ll start off light, gradually intensifying as the weather system moves closer to us,” said meteorologist Robert Baruffaldi. “We’re looking at the heaviest rain starting late on Thursday.”

Meanwhile, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors ratified a declaration of local emergency at La Conchita that was first ordered by Sheriff Larry Carpenter over the weekend. In all, seven houses and two trailers were buried or damaged beneath the tons of soil and debris.

Carpenter told the supervisors that 73 homes are still in danger. He said 30 deputies at a time are stationed in La Conchita on 12-hour shifts in addition to nearly a 100 firefighters, rescue workers and other county officials.

“This is a dynamic situation that’s not over with,” Carpenter said. “We’re here in a life-saving mode.”

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Residents have been evacuated from about 75 houses directly below the unstable hillside, with yellow police tape restricting access to those streets.

With half a dozen sheriff’s deputies and firefighters watching the hillside Tuesday, Claude Martin of Sherman Oaks worked steadily through the morning to clear mud from the base of his three small trailers that have been his family vacation retreat for a quarter of a century.

Caked in waist-high mud, 90-year-old Martin disconnected the water and utility lines to the trailers that sit at the edge of the slide. County firefighters and road crews used a skip-loader to dig out the trailer’s hitch, then towed it to an open lot farther from the mountain.

“We sure hate to see it go, but it’s got to go,” Martin said.

Many residents believe the landslide was triggered, in part, by irrigation of avocado and citrus trees in the groves on the hillside above La Conchita. But geologists found otherwise in a 1993 study paid for by the citrus and avocado ranch owners.

“They concluded that the hillside was basically dry until they got very deep and that meant the water had to have been coming from someplace other than the ranch,” Fisher said.

For many residents of La Conchita, a small community sandwiched between Rincon Mountain and the Ventura Freeway, the long-term effects of the landslide are only now beginning to hit.

Some residents said they believe there will never again be homes on Vista Del Rincon Road, which runs at the base of the mountain with ocean views.

At a briefing Monday, county officials told residents to prepare to abandon their homes for months until the hillside stabilizes.

“When they threw out the term months --I really don’t think that has registered with us,” said Dorothy Bonenberger, a six-year resident of La Conchita who is living temporarily with her husband and her Jack Russell terrier at a Carpinteria motel.

“We stood here last Saturday and watched that whole thing come down. Nothing they had told us . . . prepared us for what we were seeing,” she said.

Like many of her neighbors, Bonenberger said she is anxious to see what happens with the next round of storms. On Tuesday she returned to her home briefly to retrieve unpaid bills and more of the couple’s clothes.

Looking up Fillmore Street at her home now lined by sandbags, Bonenberger said she felt a kinship to Malibu residents displaced in the past by wildfires and mudslides.

“They get buried, they’re out for X number of months and then they go back and build,” she said, “because they enjoy living there.”

At Tuesday night’s meeting, county officials assured about 60 to 75 La Conchita residents that authorities are working to keep utilities operating to homes that are not damaged or threatened.

And County Tax Assessor Glenn Gray told residents that taxes will be discounted or prorated for the period between the slide and July 1 for owners of the nine homes that were destroyed. In addition, his office will be looking at property taxes for the whole community, he said.

“It’s going to be very difficult to come up with the right (property tax) values,” Gray said. “We will do what the law allows us to do.”

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To help displaced residents cope with finding housing, food and clothes, Red Cross officials opened an assistance center Tuesday beneath a tent near the entrance to La Conchita. Volunteers at the center, open daily between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., will interview residents to figure out their most critical needs.

An overnight shelter at the Ventura County Fairgrounds was closed Tuesday after only six people stayed Monday night.

“We know this is going to be a prolonged disaster,” said Brian E. Bolton, executive director of the Ventura County chapter of the Red Cross. “Frankly, our volunteer resources are getting a little stretched.”

Times staff writer Duncan Martell contributed to this report.