Slide Buried Homes but Not the Holiday Spirit of Some

The Grinch already stole Christmas in this seaside community when he took the form of a giant landslide in March, crushing residents’ dream homes and forcing hundreds to flee.

“There is a lot of sadness in the town,” said Chris Caputo, whose house was flattened by the March 4 slide that unleashed 600,000 tons of mud on the community. “Christmas is just a bummer for everybody.”

With less than a week until the big day, few houses in La Conchita wear the ribbons of red- and green-colored lights that dot the county. The U.S. Postal Service estimates that holiday mail delivery to the village has dropped by more than 15% from last year. And many La Conchita residents plan to head out to spend Christmas with relatives.

“It is going to be really strange,” said Caputo, whose family will celebrate the holiday with her sister in Santa Ynez. “We had such a good view of the ocean and we always had a lot of people over. It is really going to be a different Christmas for us.”

But though the slide annihilated the Caputos’ seaside retreat, they--along with many of their former neighbors--have not allowed the disaster to destroy their Christmas spirit. Last week, Caputo and her husband George, 57, decided to decorate what remains of the hillside house--a triangular roof stuck like a piece of tile in a mound of dirt.

Legs pointing toward the sky, a Santa Claus is trapped head-first in the Caputo home’s former chimney. The couple foraged in the bushes and found last year’s dried-out Christmas tree, which is now adorned with yellow police tape that cordons off many of La Conchita’s condemned homes.

And in a testament to both the Caputos’ sense of humor and to their frustration that nothing has been done to stabilize the sagging hillside, red spray paint on one side of the roof reads “WHAT SLIDE!”

La Conchita residents were tickled when they noticed the decorations at the former Caputo residence Sunday.

“It is pretty good when a person is totally devastated and they can make a little light of it,” said 62-year-old Warren Bateman, who now lives in Mussel Shoals after his four-bedroom home received heavy cracks in the slide. “They want Christmastime to be a good time of year, and it’s the best they can do.”

But other residents, including Michael Scheck, interpreted the display as a statement.

“There’s 600,000 tons of dirt up there that nobody wants to do anything about,” said Scheck, 51.

Caputo said she and her husband hoped to bring a little levity to a community still rebounding from disaster. But she also said they intended to use the decorations to send a message to county and federal officials.

“They don’t seem to know about us,” Caputo said. “They want us to go away.”

In fact, residents say, the town’s 1994 population has dropped by at least a third.

A small slide in an uninhabited area just north of the coastal hamlet last week alarmed residents, who fear that more of the hillside might come down in La Conchita when the full force of winter hits.

County officials have installed several $60,000 measuring devices to track the movement of the earth and are seeking more than $300,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fund a study on how to secure the hillside, which is owned by a private ranch. But FEMA has yet to release money for the project.

County officials say they are doing all they can to help. But they say the burden of fixing the hillside rests with the residents and La Conchita Ranch Corp. because the slide occurred on private property.

“We haven’t abandoned these people,” said Dennis Slivinski, assistant county counsel. “We are working every day trying to get this study done. But we don’t have authority to spend money to cure a landslide on private property.”

Some residents, whose homes were not severely damaged in the disaster, said they are looking forward to the holidays and are just thankful no one was injured in the slide. Although Sharon Ready lives on Vista del Rincon Drive, where the hill came down, she has decided to finish remodeling her house. Construction workers spent a recent weekday hammering panels on the exterior of the house, which resembles a castle with turrets.

“We need to go forward,” said Ready, 52. “The forward direction is just to finish it and see what happens.”

Joel Ortiz, the 23-year-old manager of the town’s only food store, La Conchita Market, said business has dipped about 10% from last year’s holiday season but that people appeared to be gearing up for Christmas.

“You get some people who are bummed out, but a lot of people still have the spirit,” Ortiz said.