La Conchita Residents, Ventura County Officials Point Fingers

For nearly a decade, Ventura County officials and residents of La Conchita have fought over whether the tiny ocean-side town was safe.

Monday, nature resolved that argument, but not the question of who was to blame.

County officials said Monday that ever since 1995, when 600,000 tons of mud slid onto the town and crushed nine homes, residents have known they were living below an unstable slope and that another disaster could occur.

“This is the site of an ancient landslide, and everyone who lives there is aware of that,” said Ron Coons, Ventura County public works chief. Signs warning of a potential landslide have been posted for years in the community.

But as they searched through the rubble Monday, angry residents blamed the county for not protecting them.

Andrew Mccrary said he and his wife, Cara, were walking along the beach Monday afternoon and came home to find they had no home left.

Late in the afternoon, sitting on a curb beside the Ventura Freeway, he wept.

“I lost my best friend,” he said, referring to one of the victims of the deadly mudslide. “And it’s the county’s fault.”

Dan Teague, another longtime La Conchita resident, said county officials had promised after the 1995 landslide to terrace the hillsides above the town and to take other safety measures to stabilize the hill.

Officials had said they needed several dry years in order to do the work without endangering the homes below, he said, adding: “Well, we had all these dry years. And what did they do? Nothing.”

Ventura County Supervisor Steve Bennett defended the county’s actions.

“It’s understandable that people would ask those kinds of questions,” he said. But, he added, county officials had no way of predicting what he described as a “catastrophic failure.”

Officials said Monday that the county had taken several steps to protect the town, installing motion detectors on the slope and building a retaining wall at the base of the hill between the slide zone and the community.

“There are mobile sensors on the hillside below the fault line. You can see the fault line -- halfway up the hills there’s a crease.... That’s where the sensors were put up,” said Ventura County Sheriff Bob Brooks.

Brooks said county hydrologists had been monitoring the hillside because of the recent heavy rain but added, “it’s surprising it went with this kind of magnitude and this kind of volume.”

In 2000, as they finished the $400,000 retaining wall, county officials had warned that the 18-foot steel-and-wood structure would help control mudflows and minor sliding, not a full collapse of the slope.

“If Mother Nature chooses to move the hill, there is nothing we can do about it,” Chris Hooke, principal engineer for the county’s transportation department, said at the time.

The 1995 slide prompted lawsuits against the county and the ranch company whose irrigation of a hilltop orchard was blamed by residents for the disaster. The residents’ suit against the county was dismissed; a claim against the ranch was settled.

“Our experts basically predicted what was going to happen today,” said Robert Bruce, the plaintiffs’ attorney in one of the suits.

As with many Southern California disasters over the years, as residents dug through the rubble Monday, many debated why they had stayed.

Don Lee, a 55-year-old post office employee, said he had lived in La Conchita for 15 years but moved out eventually.

“I tried to convince people that it was going to happen again, but some people just won’t listen,” said Lee, who now lives in Carpinteria.

His sister-in-law, Diane Hart, who was injured Monday, had left and returned, he said, “because she loved that community so much.”

Ernie Garcia, a 78-year-old retired Lockheed worker whose house is one of the town’s largest, voiced a familiar California sentiment.

“Where would I go?” he demanded. “I’m not going anywhere. This is my life here. This is a resort.”