La Conchita Residents Scramble to Pack, Evacuate : Weather: Most people are too jittery to sleep inside residences near the unstable hillside. Deputies expand danger zone to include 141 homes.

Heeding stern warnings about the threat above their homes, dozens more La Conchita residents Thursday scrambled to pack up the last of their belongings and evacuate their eclectic, seaside community.

“This is turning into a ghost town,” said Sheriff’s Deputy Chuck Buttell as he stood near the top of San Fernando Street a short distance from the foot of the slide. “Everybody’s leaving.”

Although authorities cannot force residents to leave, most people said they were too jittery to sleep inside houses that sit beneath the steep and unstable hillside.

Sheriff’s deputies have expanded the danger zone to include 141 homes after federal and state geologists said flooding, mud flows and additional landslides are likely with heavy downpours expected through the end of the week.

“We’re talking about 600,000 tons of loose soil,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Dick Purnell. “That water is going to pick up soil and move it right down your road.”

Meeting with La Conchita homeowners, Purnell suggested they take a mini-vacation. “I would tell my family, ‘Hey, we haven’t been to San Diego lately, let’s take a three-day weekend.’ ”

Lt. Arve Wells, who oversees the sheriff’s search and rescue teams, told residents not to count on being rescued if they stay home and are trapped by a mudslide.

The first priority for rescuers, he said, is to clear other residents from the area. The second is to make sure the area is safe enough for rescue efforts.

“We don’t want to have a body recovery operation going on here,” Wells said.

With forecasters calling for up to 2 1/2 inches of rain in the next 24 hours, Wells said county officials are preparing for possible flooding throughout the county and high water in the Ventura River.

If the river rises fast enough, he said, it could swamp the Ventura Freeway as it did in January, cutting off La Conchita from the rest of the county.

“As you can see, this is a very serious situation,” he told residents. “The potential is real.”

Sheriff’s officials urged residents who don’t leave their homes to sleep on the second or third story on the side away from the slope. That way, they said, residents would have better chance of survival.

*

As the leading edge of the storm reached La Conchita late Thursday, authorities staged an 8 p.m. briefing of the community’s residents that has become a nightly ritual since last Saturday’s slide.

A steady rain fell outside the briefing tent as authorities again urged remaining residents to leave. By Thursday evening, only 38 of La Conchita’s 190 homes remained occupied, authorities said.

Several residents said earlier Thursday that they had hastened their plans to leave in response to the serious tone of the warnings.

“That hill could go and you would be asleep,” said Brad Spann as he wheeled an antique safe out of his rented home on San Fernando Avenue. “Three blasts would be too late.”

Emergency officials have told residents they will repeatedly sound three short blasts on an air horn if they spot the start of another slide.

Purnell advised residents to run toward the ocean if they hear that sound, rather than trying to drive their cars out of the community’s only entrance.

Already fatigued and under stress, some residents complained Thursday of being startled by drivers honking on the highway or train engineer’s blowing their whistles.

Others said they sleep fitfully, waking at almost any noise during the night.

“About 2 o’clock in the morning, the machine in our refrigerator door dropped a bunch of ice,” said Barbara Bell as she helped a neighbor, Jonathan Harrel, toss a few more sandbags around his home. “Both of us were out of bed and headed for the front door.”

Bell said she planned to stay with her husband, Mike, at their home on Surfside Drive on Thursday night.

Harrel said his wife Norma was too nervous to remain and had rented a motel room in Carpinteria.

Harrel said most residents are relying on their sense of humor to cope. “If we couldn’t laugh about this, we’d go bonkers,” he said.

Said Bell: “You see the mental health counselors walking around and you laugh and tell them you’re beyond that already.”

The newly-expanded “hazard zone” now encompasses all of Vista Del Rincon Drive; Fillmore, San Fernando and Zelzah avenues and half the dwellings on seven other streets.

Standing in his doorway, Harold Carver, 79, said he was determined not to leave until movers had packed up most of his three-story home.

*

Carver was perhaps the last resident to remain inside a house on Vista Del Rincon where nine homes were buried or crushed during Saturday’s slide.

“I’m still not convinced it’s going to come down,” he said. “Anybody that’s been through two wars, shot down and other things, you don’t scare easily.”

Even so, Carver said he would probably sleep Thursday in his mobile home parked facing downhill.

“I can always get in that and take the brake off,” he said.

Times staff writer Christina Lima contributed to this report.