5 Years After Landslide, Suits Still Inching Along

Five years ago tonight, 46 families fled their dream homes atop an Anaheim hill, rushing away as a landslide tore cracks through walls, split driveways and wrenched swimming pools apart.

Since then, fissures and pipelines, sidewalks and sewers outside the homes along the slide have been repaired. Millions of gallons of water that had turned a 100-foot bluff into mud have been pumped out. The city has spent $8.18 million to ensure that the tony streets at the pinnacle of Anaheim Hills look as inviting as they ever did.

But while geologists differ over whether the ground that slid more than 14 inches in two weeks in 1993 is finally stable, the future of the area, and of the people who lived there, is decidedly not.

“For Sale” signs hang forlornly outside many of the homes. Renters in some houses say they hear walls creaking at night and believe the hill has not stopped slipping. Owners who remain in homes still riven by cracks caused by the landslide say they are prisoners of vast houses they cannot sell at prices anywhere near their former value.

With damage from landslides not covered by insurance companies in California--and most residents making too much money to qualify for low-interest loans the federal government offers to disaster victims--there has been little financial help to rebuild.

“The landslide was just like a boat passing through, and now we’re in the wake. It’s not just the disaster that has ruined us, it’s everything that has gone on since,” said Cliff Tatro, who bought his 9,600-square-foot Anaheim Hills home for $2.1 million four years before the landslide.

The slide cracked his pool and driveway and left fissures several inches wide through the center of his patio. His homeowners insurance did not cover landslide damage, and when the value of his home dipped below what he owed on it, Tatro stopped making mortgage payments. In 1995, with the bank about to foreclose, he sold the house for $725,000. Now he rents a home one-fifth the size in Huntington Beach.

“I had a dream home. . . . I had a lot of money in the bank. I was 42, and things were just starting to get good, really good,” Tatro said. “And then in one day it all changed. That was the day of the landslide.”

Anaheim officials say they have the slide area under control and the hillside has not moved a centimeter since February 1993. Homeowners say the ground is still moving, but officials explain it as “expansive soil.”

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But potential buyers are wary of city assurances, and lawsuits filed by homeowners against the city are dragging on with no resolution in sight. Home prices have never fully recovered from the disaster.

“In effect, you’ve got damaged goods up there in more ways than one: the damage to the perception of the buyer who says, ‘Why should I pay 100% of true value when the laws of nature have taken their toll here, and I don’t know if that’s going to happen again?’ ” said Louis Masotti, director of the real estate management program at UC Irvine.

“I think that’s what Anaheim Hills is,” he said. “It’s a psychologically damaged market.”

From the beginning, the landslide was not the sort of natural disaster with a beginning and end that’s easy to agree on.

It had crept along for at least nine months before January 1993, moving about an inch a month. But after a series of unrelenting rains saturated the rolling hillsides, the landslide moved about an inch a day over the course of two weeks.

The damage to homes did not show up at once. Cracks that started as tiny lines in concrete and stucco turned months later into gaps big enough to swallow a basketball. Walls broke open, gas lines pulled from their supports began to leak and lavishly tiled swimming pools began to crack.

By Jan. 18, 1993, city officials feared the hillside would collapse. It never did. One home was condemned by the city and demolished after the slide. The rest still stand, the cracks hidden by rugs and furniture, plants and paint.

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In the years since the slide, the city has poured money into shoring up the hillside.

Along Avenida de Santiago, Rimwood Drive, Georgetown Circle and Pegasus Street, the 25-acre area that lies at the center of the slide, 120 wells installed by the city pump and pipe ground water out of the soggy earth 24 hours a day. In 1997 alone, 39 million gallons of water was removed from the area.

Dozens of underground monitoring devices measure earth movement and ground water. In December, with El Nino-related rains threatening, the city installed two more wells to suck water out of the ground.

Emergency repairs, maintenance and study of the site have cost the city $8.18 million. About $5 million has been reimbursed to the city by federal authorities. But no more federal aid is expected, and bills continue to mount.

Maintaining the wells, which officials say are needed to prevent future slides in the area, costs the city $185,000 a year.

“We can keep it from moving. As long as we maintain this system, the homes will be able to stay there,” city engineer Natalie Armas said. “But someone needs to maintain those wells forever.”

While the wells pump the water out from the hill, attorneys hired by the city have been fighting 17 lawsuits filed by 250 homeowners after the disaster.

The plaintiffs include the 46 families evacuated during the slide and more than 200 more with homes nearby who contend their dwellings also were damaged. The homeowners blame the city for allowing homes on what they say is a known landslide-prone area, and they say their properties have lost value as a result. They are seeking a total of $140 million in damages.

The development companies that built the homes have long gone out of business.

To date, the city has spent $8.78 million in legal fees to fight the lawsuits. None have been resolved.

As the lawsuits drag on--no trial date has been set in any of the actions, and seven plaintiffs have died since they filed suit--the city and homeowners remain at odds over the simplest questions about what happened that rainy January.

They disagree on what caused the landslide, whether the city did enough to try to prevent it, when it began and whether the land is still sliding. The two sides cannot even agree on the boundaries of the landslide.

Homeowners claim the city knew about an ancient landslide in the area and never should have allowed homes to be built there. When the homes were built in the late 1970s, homeowners say, they should have been informed of the danger.

“They knew this was an ancient landslide area. They started seeing evidence of movement months before things got really bad, but instead of taking steps to prevent the landslide, they did nothing,” said plaintiffs attorney William Stoner.

City officials acknowledge that much of Anaheim Hills was built on landslide-prone areas. But they say they were not aware of potential danger in the area of the 1993 landslide until the year before, when their geologists first detected significant ground movement under the homes.

“When we got reports on this in ‘92, we went out and started investigating. Then when it started accelerating in ’93 during the rains, we took a very proactive role,” Armas said. “It was really a big response of, ‘We are here to help you’ . . . and it worked. The landslide stopped. Now [the litigation] looks like it has no end.”

Seventeen homeowners involved in the lawsuits have allowed banks to foreclose rather than make payments on their torn homes. Sixteen people who contend their homes were damaged by the slide have sold their houses at a loss. All told, 36 families that lived through the landslide have moved away.

“It’s not a matter of picking up roots, it’s a matter of your roots being cut out from underneath you,” said Gerald Steiner, who fled his home on the night of the evacuations, when helicopters screamed overhead and families ran out of their homes into a downpour, clutching clothing and mementos. He and his wife never went back inside.

Today, the Spanish-style home sits empty, a 4-inch crack running up the driveway and through a retaining wall. City officials say the home was not judged by their geologists to be unsafe to live in, and the family could have repaired the cracks and moved back in. Steiner says he doesn’t believe the home has stopped moving.

“As far as we were concerned, it was like a bomb blast,” Steiner said. “When we left that home, we never spent another night there.”