Mudslides Loosed by Rains Threaten Bay Area Homes

The Delgado family home leaned at a 45-degree angle Friday, its foundation ripped away by a slow-motion disaster--a football field-size mudslide that also endangers seven other houses.

“We’ve gone through all of the emotions: denial, sadness, grief,” Maria Delgado, 45, said as she stood across the street, unable to get any closer to her disintegrating half-million-dollar house. “But now we’re just angry. We want to know what happens now.”

The Delgados and four other families evacuated Tuesday as a rain-weakened hillside slid toward their homes in this suburb south of San Francisco.

The slide buckled one foundation, punched a tree through the garage wall of another home and sent a wall of mud into the bedroom of a third.

Firefighters used poles and guns to break windows, to prevent the glass from exploding outward.

Residents of three houses at the top of the unstable hill were told to stay out of their backyards and warned that they might have to leave at a moment’s notice. Heavy rains have caused several landslides recently in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Millbrae has appealed to state and federal officials for aid for the families, because home insurance policies sometimes do not cover natural disasters. The city has declared a state of emergency and authorized spending about $100,000 on temporary repairs on the hill.

Last February was the rainiest in San Francisco history, and several storms over the last two weeks sent the Millbrae hillside sliding about 50 feet.

Two days of dry weather slowed the slide to a crawl Friday.

In Daly City, six miles south of San Francisco, a crumbling bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean was threatening to destroy 18 homes.