Laguna Can Relate to Gulf Coast

With bodies floating down the streets in New Orleans, it’s not the best timing to ask whether Laguna Beach got the shaft in being turned down for federal relief for the June landslide that claimed 20 homes in Bluebird Canyon.

It may be more on point, in fact, to ask whether there’s any point in the city appealing the rejection, given that Hurricane Katrina no doubt will dominate federal relief efforts for the foreseeable future and require billions of dollars.

At the very least, the city says it’d like to know why FEMA officials (remember them?) said no to Laguna’s plea for assistance. The agency announced its decision two weeks ago, saying it couldn’t specifically link the landslide to last winter’s rains. That conclusion conflicted with what city, state and federal geologists concluded, according to Laguna Beach’s mayor.

Let’s not insult our collective intelligence by comparing the destruction in Laguna Beach with that in the Gulf Coast. Disasters, though, come in small and large packages and if the point of federal relief is to offset the costs of bouncing back, why not Laguna?

But, yes, it’s a touchy subject these days. It’s touchy even to Diane Stevens, who lost her home in the landslide.

“I feel like I have a healthy community around me to support me, where if you’re living in some of those cities [hit by Katrina], some of their entire support system has been washed away -- from work to banks to city government,” Stevens says. “It’s difficult for me to imagine trying to put the pieces back together in my life without the support of my city, church, friends, family, schools. They’ve all been there for me and our family. And they’re able to do it because it didn’t happen to them, where in the South, it just really happened to everybody.”

Stevens, her husband and two kids, 11 and 15, have moved 10 times since losing their home -- the result of stringing together a series of house-sitting ventures.

Relief funds would go to the city of Laguna Beach, not the homeowners. Its importance is that the city needs it to help stabilize the hillside and that homeowners who want to rebuild can’t do so until that’s done. In the meantime, displaced homeowners are paying a mortgage for houses that don’t exist and weren’t eligible for landslide insurance.

During our conversation, Stevens couldn’t have been more sympathetic toward the Hurricane Katrina victims. But she suggests that Laguna’s dislocated homeowners were as much the victim of a natural disaster as were Gulf Coast residents. In other words, she says, it’s not as though Laguna’s canyon residents recklessly bought homes in harm’s way.

The neighborhood last had a landslide in 1978, her house was built 40 years ago and the land was found geologically sound when tested just a few years ago.

“I don’t see the difference between living in a known hurricane or tornado area and what we are living in,” she says. “We wouldn’t be gambling with our life savings by putting it into a structure we felt might fall down a hill one day. We don’t have that kind of money to play with.”

In short, stuff happens. Sometimes it displaces tens of thousands of people; sometimes 20 families. That’s why you calibrate the amount of relief.

The city is hoping for several million dollars from FEMA. That would cover, at best, probably half of what it needs to stabilize the hillside. Seen in one way, it would be pocket change compared with what will go to Katrina’s victims.

However it plays out, Stevens says her family will be fine, glumly noting that that can’t be said of all of Katrina’s victims.

“I said from Day One this is not going to destroy my family,” Stevens says. “It’s not going to be three years of hand-wringing and wasted years. I’ve got two kids -- my daughter goes off to college in three years -- and these are not going to be dreary years. We’re going to make the best of it and have a good life. And we did.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.