A Warning, Then a Race to Outrun a Pursuing Hill

As the rain kept coming and mud started to flow, Greg Ray and Tony Alvis decided to lend a hand, helping move a friend out of a Quonset hut at the base of the hillside in La Conchita.

Together, they had only been at it about 15 minutes when neighbor John Morgan sounded the first warning.

“The mountain is coming down!” he shrieked.

Standing directly underneath the tumbling hillside, hearing its terrible crackle and roar and watching a plume of earth spew toward the sky, the men broke and ran for their lives.

With the hillside exploding, shooting dirt and boulders 100 feet high, Ray, 61, sprinted down Vista del Rincon Drive, then wheeled right, onto Santa Barbara Avenue, making a beeline for the ocean.

He lost sight of the others as the hillside bore down.

Out of the corner of one eye, he could see a house and a trailer in hot pursuit. Instinctively, he ducked for cover, throwing himself between two cars and wedging into the smallest of lifesaving cracks, just as the mud and debris washed over him.

“I just turned and dove underneath these cars, that’s what saved my life,” said Ray from the county hospital in Ventura, with scratches and bruises and a gaping wound where a splintered 2-by-4 had speared his right leg.

His friends weren’t so lucky.

Alvis and Morgan were unable to outrun the slide, succumbing to the wall of mud and debris.

Ray said he learned Tuesday that the men were found dead on each side of him.

“It was so horrific,” he said. “It all happened so fast.”

It took three hours to rescue Ray, an artist who has lived in La Conchita on and off for a decade.

Badly hurt and thrown into pitch-black darkness, he could hear people crying and screaming all around him. He reached down to his injured leg, thinking a piece of wood was laying across it, only to find the stake protruding through the limb.

He could turn his head a little and move his hands. While trapped, he took a picture of himself with a disposable camera he was carrying in his shirt pocket to record the moment. The weight of the cars, now under the trailer that had given chase, pressed down on him and made it hard to breathe.

Two friends from the community found him within minutes and alerted rescue crews, who cut him out of the wreckage.

“It was scary. I didn’t really know whether I was going to make it,” Ray said. “I told myself, ‘I just have to bear the pain. I have to make it. I have to survive.’ ”

He learned after his surgery Monday that Alvis, a fellow artist and quasi-business partner, didn’t make it.

And the sorrow deepened when told Tuesday afternoon that Morgan also had perished.

“He was the one who saved my life,” Ray said of Morgan, a groundskeeper for Naval Base Ventura County in Port Hueneme. “He was a real good guy.”

A fourth person, named Kyle, the man Ray and Alvis had been helping, made it out alive.

Set to be released from the hospital in a few days, Ray said he’s eager to return to La Conchita despite the devastation.

His home was not damaged. And the painter and woodcarver figures he’s got plenty of work to do, especially on behalf of his good friend Alvis. Ray said Alvis would have wanted the community to push forward.

“I don’t really have any fear of La Conchita. It’s done everything it can to me,” he said. “It’s a really nice place with a lot of good people.”