Victims of Slide Worry About Cost of Repairs

If not for the Northridge earthquake, Lou and Reata Vaughn might have been buried alive Friday morning. After a 2:30 a.m. mudslide, the elderly couple’s seismically retrofitted foundation was the only thing between them and a 30-foot drop into a muddy ravine.

Awakened by a violent crash, Lou Vaughn, 66, rushed to the window and gasped.

“There’s no backyard left; it’s gone,” he later said he told his wife.

The mudslide left the rear edge of the Vaughns’ recently rebuilt home jutting over open space, and their future uncertain.

All but one of the five homes damaged in Friday’s mudslide are owned by elderly couples. No one was injured in the slide, but the evacuated families wondered how they would afford repairs and bear the emotional burden so soon after the 1994 quake.

Below the Vaughns’ Napa Street home, Virgil and Rita Palub’s house was buried under a wall of soil. The mudslide smashed into their living room and crushed their garage, with their two cars still inside. The weight of the wet earth twisted the home’s wood frame and jammed shut their front door. Rita Palub said she and her disabled husband were trapped in the house for half an hour, until Los Angeles city firefighters hacked through the front door.

The couple moved into the house in 1963, when the tract was new. Rita Palub, a retired schoolteacher, said they took meticulous care of their home, planting avocado and fruit trees, and regularly pruning rose bushes in the backyard. In 1994 the home was spared serious damage, but Friday’s incident was another matter.

“We thought this house was going to be the last one we would ever be in,” Rita Palub said. “I don’t think we’ll build again.”

Floyd and Minnie Rodrigues said they heard a sound like thunder and woke up to find their digital clock dark.

Minnie Rodrigues, 73, ran outside and noticed that the steppingstones that had once crossed her lawn were now headed down a newly created slope of mud. Then she looked up.

“My God,” she recalled thinking to herself. “The garage isn’t there.”

Indeed, 12 feet down and 20 feet away, the garage was wedged against the back of a neighbor’s home, the Rodrigueses’ Ford Taurus still parked inside. Their van teetered on the edge of the shorn driveway. The backyard was now a cliff.

Richard Magdaleno’s Shoup Avenue house, situated below the Vaughns’, was virtually unscathed by the mudslide, but his backyard was buried under 10 feet of loam, twisted fences and uprooted fruit trees. Magdaleno, 51, estimated it would cost him about $50,000 to clear his backyard and restore city-mandated grading.

“I’m just starting to realize how much work I put into this place and how quickly it’s just tossed away,” he said.

City firefighters offered to retrieve essential belongings from the mudslide victims’ red-tagged homes.

Minnie Rodrigues knew exactly what she wanted: “My glasses are on the table in the family room . . . and underwear, I definitely need underwear.”

Paramedics were called to examine Reata Vaughn, whose diabetes and heart condition may have been aggravated by the morning’s events. She said she needed a strong drink, and got it at her neighbor’s house.

Holding a shot of tequila in one shaking hand, Vaughn regained composure and reflected on her plight.

“I guess life is uncertain,” she said. “You always have to be ready to release what you have--but I am not yet.”