Risk Goes Hand in Hand With Beauty

Ventura County officials say it was tough to reason with residents of La Conchita.

They were living under a looming 600-foot cliff that slumped a decade ago and destroyed about half a dozen houses. And then there was the Model T Ford buried in someone’s backyard that hinted at earlier cataclysmic events.

Signs posted by the county -- “Enter at Your Own Risk” -- after the 1995 disaster were torn down. Someone even defiantly spray-painted: “What Slide?” on the collapsed roof of a house.

But many longtime residents bet that life at the beach was worth the danger, a gamble with nature that many Californians routinely take to one extent or another.

The wager was lost Monday when a slide killed at least six residents and left a dozen more missing under 30 feet of mud.

Now the question returns: Should La Conchita continue to exist?

“What’s the balance between a person’s right to use their property and the government’s obligation to place restrictions on them for their own safety?” said Tom Berg, director of Ventura County’s Resources Management Agency, which oversees land use. “It’s a tough call.”

For that matter, it’s a tough call all over California, a state formed by earthquakes, wildfires and floods.

“If you talk to geologists you would find that there’s no safe place in California, the risks are enormous,” said George Lefcoe, a professor of real estate law at USC. “But we don’t live in a paternalistic society. Our laws make it really very difficult to force people out.”

Nearly two dozen residents ignored strong pleas to leave even after the hillside collapsed Monday. And some who did evacuate are as eager as ever to resume their precarious existence below the muddy bluffs.

“I’m fighting for my home,” said Roberta Ski, 50, who sat smoking a cigarette outside a Red Cross shelter in Ventura on Tuesday morning, and vowed to return home. “This is definitely my future.”

County officials say there may be little they can do to stop her. After the 1995 slide, officials said legal protections made it hard to force the residents out, and in any case, too costly to do so.

The county, they said, could only watch as newcomers paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for property that had plummeted in value after the slide.

Gisela Woggon, 58, who has lived in La Conchita for 7 1/2 years, hopes things are different this time. “I think it would be foolish to let anybody live so close to the slide,” she said. “I think this is it for La Conchita.”

Planned as Buffer Zone

La Conchita is a town built on ground that the railroad flattened after a 1909 slide slammed into the Southern Pacific tracks and killed four people. The land was intended to be a buffer between an eroding cliff and the coastal plain.

But in 1924, it was subdivided. The narrow strip grew into the funky weekend retreat, and then a permanent home for many. In 1975, La Conchita Ranch Co., began operating a citrus and avocado farm on a plateau high above the community.

Angry residents blamed the ranch for the 1995 slide. In a series of lawsuits, they contended that irrigation of hundreds of acres of avocado and citrus orchards made the hillside unstable, and that the county should never have allowed it.

A judge disagreed. The ranch had previously settled another suit out of court for tens of millions of dollars, said John F. McGuire, an attorney for the residents.

Now, some residents have renewed accusations of wrongdoing on the part of the ranch and county.

“You cannot have an orchard on top of an ancient landslide on top of a town,” said Santa Barbara attorney Robert Brace, who represented residents in a 1997 lawsuit. “Our experts basically predicted what was going to happen.... The county should have stopped the irrigation, or moved the people.”

At the same time, attorneys for the ranch, and others, cited the history of landslides that predate the orchard.

“There’s been people killed and homes buried for a long time,” said ranch attorney Frank T. Sabaitis.

Jeffrey Hemphill, a UC Santa Barbara doctoral student who was part of La Conchita Ranch’s legal team, said Tuesday that more landslides there were inevitable.

“With the intensity of rain we have seen in the past week, this was certainly predictable,” he said. “The whole area is built to slide.”

County officials prohibited new residential construction in the community after the 1995 slide, and installed detectors to monitor further movement.

The county also built a $400,000, 18-foot retaining wall at the base of the hill between the slide zone and the community, which was obliterated by Monday’s slide.

County officials had warned that the wall would do little in the event of a major disaster. At the time of the 1995 landslide, the cost of securing the cliff was put at $30 million to $50 million.

Move to Ban Residents

Residents’ anger already has focused on county officials.

After the 1995 landslide, critics called for county officials to prohibit the return of residents, and perhaps buy the threatened homes.

But the county declined.

“Why should we obligate the taxpayers to buy out 100 homes?” said Assistant County Counsel Dennis Slivinski, who handled the landslide litigation.

“That’s just transferring the risk from the individuals who chose to live in those homes to the taxpayers,” he said. “Absent the loss of life, this was no different than if earth slid into your yard. Would you expect the county to come and buy your house? Of course not.”

Some geological experts maintained after the 1995 landslide that the hill might not collapse again for five or 10 or even 100 years, Berg said.

And when Ventura County’s real estate market heated up in the last few years, La Conchita homes sold.

“Right after the last disaster, nobody was buying anything,” he said. “But as time went by, there was quite a market out there. People kind of forgot what had happened.”

Until Monday’s slide, about 190 dwellings remained in the community and 39 lots were vacant, including about half a dozen where houses were destroyed a decade ago. Thirteen more homes were lost Monday, Berg said, and 19 more are damaged so severely they cannot be occupied without repair.

Residents shocked by the devastation and deaths of well-known neighbors watched Tuesday as emergency workers scaled a mountain of rubble in what had been a placid community. Many homes here are pleasantly ramshackle, bougainvillea-draped structures growing around a Quonset hut here, an old mobile home there.

Many wondered what would become of a place they considered a haven -- for surfers, fishermen, construction workers, retirees and assorted oddballs.

Michael Farrow described his home for 10 years as “the redheaded ugly stepchild of Ventura County,” a place where people took pride in doing their own thing.

“We all knew the mountain could come down,” said Farrow, a construction worker with a bad back. “We were just praying it wouldn’t. We were obviously in denial.”

Other residents said the danger of the hill, if thought of at all, was pushed to the back of their minds.

“Everyone got used to it. People started moving back, even moving into the houses at the edge of the old slide. People became complacent,” Woggon said. “No one suspected this.”

Even if they had, she said, “People here are very stubborn. People are gamblers here.”

Times staff writers Megan Garvey, Richard Fausset and Kenneth R. Weiss contributed to this report.