A decade later, evidence of La Cañada’s mudslide is gone, but memories remain
On Feb. 6, 2010, shortly after 5 a.m., residents of La Cañada’s Paradise Valley neighborhood were largely asleep in their beds, hunkered down against the pounding rain outside, when they were alerted by thunderous noise.
The hillsides of the surrounding Angeles National Forest — denuded of vegetation by the ravaging 160,000-acre Station fire five months earlier — were beginning to succumb to the downpour.
Cement K-rails placed along Ocean View Boulevard became weighty projectiles that moved swiftly downstream, sweeping up cars and plunging into the homes they were designed to protect.
The first weekend of February 2010, characterized by a rainstorm that dropped 4 inches of rain on areas vulnerable to mudslides in the wake of the 2009 Station fire, battered in particular the Paradise Valley area of La Cañada.
“The K-rails pounding the cement — it was just these huge boom sounds,” Patty Kindel reflected on the disaster 10 years later. “I kept pulling the covers up over my head and holding my pets close.”
Three blocks away, Donna McLaughlin’s family was preparing for an out-of-town trip when mud and debris surrounded, and then infiltrated, their house.
Her husband pushed a dining room table against a window to stem the flow but was tossed like a rag doll across the room. McLaughlin and her daughter fled to the attic, only to find the mud had risen above the roof line.
“It went through the house, and over the house and around the house,” she said. “[Afterward], I just broke down and cried. The house was gone.”
Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger toured the neighborhood Feb. 7, surveying a debris basin clogged by a 10-ton boulder. Building inspectors red-tagged properties unfit for dwelling, while city officials eased the permitting process to help homeowners rebuild.
McLaughlin’s family was displaced for 10 months while they rebuilt. The ordeal is still painful to recall, she said, but its ravages were equally matched by the many acts of kindness that followed.
Members of three nearby Mormon churches arrived with shovels to help clear homes from tons of debris. Local businesses provided free groceries and services to the afflicted. And neighbors pitched in to help one another.
“I didn’t even know Patty until she was walking by my house one day as I was hosing mud and crying my eyes out,” McLaughlin said. “Now she’s one of my best friends.”
A few years ago, Kindel and a small group of residents revamped the buried and long-neglected entrance signs to Paradise Valley in a symbolic act of recovery.
“That was the last reminder of what we went through, and it’s gone now,” she said. “That’s good.”
