Landslide’s Upheaval Wasn’t All Downhill

At the Landslide Inn, miniature plastic mermaids sit atop a tiki bar, cool breezes waft through windows, and a fake fireplace flickers near a couch.

No, this isn’t the lobby of a seaside resort. It’s a battered trailer that Lori Herek has disguised as a tropical hideaway to distract herself from reality.

A year ago today, she and her neighbors lost their homes to a landslide in Laguna Beach’s Bluebird Canyon. Since then, they’ve been on an odyssey both exhausting and enlightening. While trying to reassemble their lives, the Bluebird refugees have indulged in gallows humor and encountered minor miracles and lessons about life, God and Costco toilet paper.

And the ordeal isn’t over. Although repairs are underway on the crumbled hillside, finishing the new homes could drag into 2008.

At least one Bluebird exile has given up on returning. Others are in limbo, wondering how to foot the bill for a new house while paying off the mortgage on a home that no longer exists. Insurers don’t cover landslides.

Charitable donations and restaurant vouchers have helped, Herek said, but “all the bake sales in Orange County are not going to get us close to rebuilding a house in Laguna Beach.”

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Post-landslide life is like stepping into an alternate universe. You find yourself wearing other people’s old clothing, sleeping in strange beds and thinking unfamiliar thoughts, said Diane Stevens, whose Flamingo Road bungalow was one of 20 homes damaged or destroyed.

In the five months after June 1, Stevens’ family moved 10 times.

Steve Howard, another Flamingo Road expatriate, remembers the bizarre sensation of standing at the bottom of Bluebird Canyon -- after sprinting barefoot from his collapsing house past sparking power lines and exploding fire hydrants -- and realizing he had “no cellphone, no credit cards, no money, nothing.”

In 30 seconds, everything was gone. “Where my house used to sit is now air,” Howard said.

Some of the upheaval carries hidden benefits. “It opens you up to new things,” Stevens said, noting that her wardrobe blossomed from mostly black to bright colors because that’s what people gave her. “You try things because you have to -- and it can be good.”

Surviving a disaster also opens your heart, Herek said. After Hurricane Katrina, she helped rescue stranded animals in New Orleans. “I felt indebted to the people who saved my eight cats here,” she said. “I knew I had to give back.”

Stevens agreed. Before the landslide, “I always felt like I was kind and considerate, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in our schedules and forget to make that call or send that card. Sometimes you have to experience something to understand it. And then it stays with you and changes your life.”

Such epiphanies come at a price.

“People don’t realize all the highs and lows and changes you go through,” Howard said. “It’s an emotional roller coaster.”

After the shock wears off, physical exhaustion sets in. There’s a whirlwind of sleepless nights, daily meetings with city officials, appearances at fundraisers, changes in lodging and scrambling to replace lost items, Stevens said.

The initial chaos eventually subsides, but the exhaustion lingers, she said. “It’s more mental than physical at this point.”

To cope, the landslide brigade relies on a mix of humor, prayer, gratitude and one another.

Four of the displaced families live side by side in a quartet of donated trailers along Laguna Canyon Road. City crews hauled the mobile homes to the strip of asphalt and hooked up utilities.

“It’s nice to be around people going through the same things you are,” Stevens said.

Herek calls her unit the Landslide Inn. “We don’t like to refer to it as a trailer park,” she said.

Each family has added personal touches to create a sense of home. The Meisters painted giant flowers on the outside of their trailer. Howard, a contractor, replaced the plastic-lined shower in his mobile home with tiles. Herek plugged in a fake hearth from Home Depot.

“I couldn’t stand being without a fireplace,” she said.

But storage is a problem. Herek still dresses out of a suitcase. And Stevens discovered that shopping at Costco doesn’t mix with mobile-home living. She bought a pallet of toilet paper at the warehouse store, only to discover there was nowhere to put it. “We had to store it under the trailer in plastic crates.”

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Enduring one disaster doesn’t confer immunity from future traumas. Life marches on: births, deaths, love and loss.

Herek buried her mother in February. Bluebird expatriate Robert Power grappled with cancer; his larynx was removed in January.

Two refugees welcomed additions to their households -- a little boy for the Huberty family and a girl for the MacCallum clan.

“Landslide babies,” Todd MacCallum affectionately calls them.

Some Bluebird exiles have been luckier than others. Al Trevino Jr. has logged two mini-miracles.

For months, the rear of his two-story house hovered precariously over the edge of the collapsed hillside. Engineers debated whether they could save the home. But the ground underneath stayed put, and the city eventually propped up the structure with giant steel beams.

“I could never figure out why that part of the house didn’t come down,” said Trevino, 74, a retired Irvine Co. planner.

Miracle No. 2 was a painting that had hung in his living room for years. Shortly after the slide, a neighbor discovered that the artwork was a rare piece worth $500,000.

Trevino sold the picture to a private collector and bought a two-bedroom condo overlooking a golf course in Laguna Niguel.

Regarding the fate of his Bluebird Canyon home, Trevino’s 11 adult children have weighed in with as many opinions on what to do. His eldest son suggested selling it, as did renowned architect Frank Gehry, a longtime friend.

But Trevino wants to remodel. Every room on the lower level will be redone, he said. In a nod to his advancing age, he plans to install an elevator and make the home more wheelchair-accessible.

Last week, Trevino visited the site, dragging a hose from a neighbor’s home to water two parched orange trees. The red tag declaring his house unsafe has faded to white. The home’s inside is barren.

Trevino entered and walked to a corner where floor-to-ceiling windows offer a bird’s-eye view of the canyon. “This is where I was standing when I saw the hill open up and drop away.”

Putting Bluebird Canyon back together has been an undertaking riddled with problems and delays, in part because soil conditions vary from one square foot to the next, said the city’s slide relief coordinator, Bob Burnham.

In December, Laguna voters passed a half-cent-on-the-dollar sales tax hike to help defray the estimated $16.8-million cost of rebuilding the hill and restoring roads and sewers. Later, in response to arm-twisting from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), federal and state officials agreed to cover most of the tab. Laguna officials have promised to use the sales tax money to create a fund for future disasters.

Meanwhile, homeowners are still on the hook for rebuilding their houses. Herek, citing estimates of at least $350 per square foot, said the cost of putting up a 2,000-square-foot home could easily hit $700,000.

She has applied for Small Business Administration disaster loans but isn’t sure she can take on that debt on top of her existing mortgage.

“I’m no closer to knowing what I’m going to do now than I was the day after the landslide,” she said. “One minute I can take an inventory of my life and feel really positive about it. The next minute, I can feel anxious and scared.”

Some Bluebird refugees have opted not to return. Power is in escrow on a house in Fallbrook, a 1.5-acre spread with 100 avocado trees.

He plans to sell his lot in Laguna, but not immediately. “The real estate market in Bluebird Canyon is dead,” he said. Potential buyers are still spooked by the landslide.

Walking away from Laguna wasn’t an easy decision, Power said. “I was never going to sell my house. I was going to die there.”