La Conchita Residents Prepare for the Risks of Another Storm : Weather: Community may be out of danger if the spring brings no new slides. Up to two inches of rain is expected in county’s coastal areas today.

As residents of battered La Conchita braced for a strong new storm Monday, a geologist said that if the oceanfront community survives the spring without another landslide it should be safe until next winter.

“After the rainy season ends, if the hill hasn’t moved for a month to six weeks, we probably won’t have any failures through the summer,” geologist Jim Fisher told about 120 residents during an evening meeting in La Conchita.

Two recent storms released 600,000 tons of earth from the hillside above the oceanfront community, destroying nine homes, damaging four and forcing the evacuation of two-thirds of the small community.

“There are lots of concerns with regards to the stability of the hill, especially any time we get more rain,” said Fisher, warning residents that they should expect more mud if today’s storm becomes a downpour.

Meteorologists said the storm is expected to hit harder in Ventura County than anywhere else in the region, bringing as much as two inches of rain to the coast and four inches to the mountains today. “Right now I couldn’t say a total ‘no’ to six inches of rain, but that would be in isolated areas,” said Curtis Brack, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc.

Showers and thunderstorms should continue through Thursday, Brack said. Winds will be milder than those of recent storms.

But residents were worried about any storm at all.

Monday afternoon, as skies darkened, 30-year La Conchita resident Elizabeth Martin-Novy removed gardening tools from a shed, the only structure still standing on her San Fernando Avenue lot.

The county removed trailers, including the one in which she lived, after thick mud flowed onto her property during the last storm. She has been commuting from her parents’ home in Sherman Oaks to remove debris and channel mud down a side street.

“Uh oh, I felt a drop of rain,” Martin-Novy said, glancing worriedly at the fallen hillside as she pushed a lawn mower from her yard.

Across the street was the ruin of a mobile home crushed by mud. “Once the rain comes, there’s nothing we can do,” she said.

Sheriff’s deputies were carefully monitoring the weather late Monday, planning to send more emergency workers to La Conchita if the storm packs its expected punch.

Sheriff’s Lt. Haskell Chandler said three officers staff the community’s command center 24 hours a day, mainly for security purposes.

“If it appears it’s going to be a storm of significant force, we’ll increase the staffing to five,” he said. “We also have a 10-man tactical response team that can respond in a moment’s notice.”

At the command center, Deputy Al Calderon said residents were waiting to see what the storm brings.

“If we get a big rain like last week, we’ll get a lot of mud running down here,” he said. “That’s about the only thing we know for sure.”