Rain Mostly Damages Nerves

Patty Newman and her husband, Gordon, watched the skies Saturday and worried that the rain would saturate the hillside behind their Malibu home, sending mud, water and rocks sliding down.

“We all have our own little, private rain gauges to measure how much has fallen,” said Patty Newman, who has lived on Bayshore Drive for 15 years with her husband, a retired college dean.

But although the latest storm over the Pacific Ocean brought more precipitation to what has already been the third-wettest rainy season in Los Angeles history, the mostly gentle drizzle caused few problems.

About 0.05 of an inch of rain fell Saturday, bringing the season’s total to 34.80, just shy of the 34.84 that fell in 1890, the second-wettest season on record. Weather officials expect enough rain to fall in the next few days to surpass that winter, making 2005’s the second-soppiest.

The all-time record is 38.18 inches, in 1884. The rainy season runs from July 1 to June 30.

The rest of the week is expected to be partly cloudy with as much as a 50% chance of rain some days.

No matter what happens, residents of the 38 homes below the unstable Malibu hill know the ground beneath them will keep shifting until a broken drainage pipe -- which sends about 750 gallons of water a day down the slope -- is repaired.

After a house three doors down from the Newman home was destroyed in a mudslide in 1978, the hill appeared to stabilize over the next two decades, residents said. But movement began again in 1998, and the problem has grown worse during this season’s torrential rains, said Steve Karsh, a longtime resident of Malibu Canyon Road.

“We are doing everything we can as private owners to protect our houses,” Karsh said Saturday, standing at the foot of the hill as a light rain fell on the gray ocean behind him. “But we can’t do anything about the drain. It’s on private property.”

Residents say the drainage pipe on Pacific Coast Highway between Corral Canyon Road and Puerco Canyon Road has been in disrepair since the 1978 slide.

Homeowners said they have repeatedly asked the owners of the property where the pipe is located to fix it -- along with Caltrans, the city of Malibu and Los Angeles County. Representatives for the government agencies and the property owner were unavailable for comment over the weekend.

At residents’ urging, the city of Malibu installed monitoring devices to measure the hill’s movement. Since January, the earth has slid 15 inches.

But Karsh does not need sensitive instruments to tell him how much the ground is shifting. All he has to do is look out his front window.

The space between his beachside deck and the front of his house is gone on one side, where the front wall is shoved up against the deck rail, as if pushed forward by giant hands. “Our houses’ greatest enemy is water, and our biggest enemy is [lack of] drainage,” Karsh said.

In Mission Viejo, where residents in January watched a rain-soaked slope cause pool decks to buckle and houses to crack, an emergency fix by city contractors finished earlier this month seems to have given some homeowners peace of mind.

Workers used earthmovers to transfer soil from the top of the 67-foot-high slope to the bottom.

“Whatever they did, we’re grateful for it,” said resident Genaro Hernandez.

He hopes to move back into his home when city engineers allow him to turn the gas and water back on.

In Anaheim Hills, where slopes above and below East Circle Haven Road began sliding two weeks ago, homeowner Sally Holiday, 68, watched nervously as city officials this week tagged a second house down the street whose backyard had eroded.

“This house is our retirement. We’re just praying and trusting God,” she said.

On Friday, Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn urged President Bush to extend federal disaster assistance for Southern California, saying that storm-related damage had risen to $120 million.

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Times staff writer Sara Lin contributed to this report.