Laguna Officials Defend Emergency Response Times

A sea of mud hampered the response time of emergency crews racing throughout Laguna Beach to answer hundreds of calls for help Monday night, but a review of dispatch logs and response times shows that police and firefighters did “the best job possible,” the city manager said Thursday.

After several residents complained that no one responded to their calls for help evacuating, City Manager Kenneth C. Frank said Thursday that some of the panicked callers “went off on their own” by the time harried rescuers arrived.

The 911 transcripts provide a chaotic chronology of the storm that damaged more than 200 homes and led directly to two deaths. Authorities responded to scores of locations, but, in at least one instance, it took at least 35 minutes to answer an evacuation plea, the tapes show.

Laguna Beach Police Chief Jim Spreine on Thursday defended the efficiency of emergency workers and said the criticism was shortsighted and “seriously saddens me.”

Canyon residents such as Tangerine Bolen have complained that no one came to their aid despite three 911 calls. On tapes released Thursday, Bolen can be heard shouting, “There are people stuck in houses up here. . . . We need emergency vehicles and we need them now!”

Another resident, Denise Hibben, said she and two friends who helped rescue a 9-month-old infant waded in thigh-deep mud to safety but then waited nearly an hour for paramedics.

The 911 tapes show emergency workers, including the city’s police and fire chiefs, rushing to respond to early calls on a cluster of canyon roads such as Victory Walk and Lewellyn Drive. On those, help often came in less than four minutes, Frank said.

Delays came later in Castle Rock, a community not known for slides, Frank said. No emergency units were in Castle Rock, where a slide killed one person and injured nine, because “it was something we did not anticipate, any more than the residents,” Frank said.

Laguna Canyon Road was blocked by flooding and heaps of mud. At one point, city lifeguards responding to the Castle Rock calls abandoned their Jeep to go on foot, the tapes show.

The longest delay was for a woman with a 6-year-old child on Stans Lane who called at 10:14 p.m. for emergency evacuation. Police cars were sent but never made it through the mud. Orange County Fire Authority units were then sent at 10:49 and arrived before 11 p.m., the tapes show.

“There was a little delay on that one,” Frank said. “Things were going to hell in the city at that point.”

Correspondent Susan Deemer contributed to this report.

Geoff Boucher can be reached at (714) 966-5983 or geoff.boucher@latimes.com