Rain-Filled Winter Blamed for Laguna Beach Landslide
A landslide that sent multimillion-dollar homes crashing down a hill Wednesday in Laguna Beach was apparently a delayed consequence of last winter's heavy rains in Southern California, and could foreshadow more devastation to come, authorities said.
No deaths or serious injuries were blamed on the slide, which announced itself with a bang just before 7 a.m., and sheared away part of the face of Laguna's scenic Bluebird Canyon. But 17 homes were destroyed and 11 seriously damaged, fire officials said.
The soil gave way near the site of an even more devastating 1978 slide, which destroyed 24 homes. Like that disaster, this one left behind a surreal landscape: houses, cars and streets that had been tilted and buckled, collapsed and smashed, with residents left to stare numbly from a distance.
It also appeared to validate the warnings of geologists, some of whom had questioned the wisdom of building in the canyon. And it raised questions about the safety of other hillside communities in Southern California in the aftermath of the near-record rainfall.
Among the areas to be closely watched, geologists said, are those that have already seen slipping: parts of Laurel Canyon, Culver City and Glendale in Los Angeles County; Anaheim Hills and Mission Viejo in Orange County; as well as La Conchita in Ventura County, where a fast-moving landslide killed 10 people and destroyed two dozen homes in January.
"We are not out of the woods yet," said Randall Jibson, a geologist and landslide expert for the U.S. Geological Survey. "This could happen for some time."
Some residents blamed the Laguna Beach slide on new construction, and city officials said they were reexamining two recent projects to see if they had destabilized the slope.
But City Manager Ken Frank said only 10 houses had been built since 1978 in the area affected by the new slide. And officials said they believed that the rain was primarily responsible for what happened Wednesday.
The crashing slope was particularly painful to critics who had fought efforts to build homes in an area prone to landslides.
"This just makes my heart sink," said Judy Rosener, a business professor at UC Irvine who served on the California Coastal Commission from 1973 to 1981. "Historically, it is known as a slide area. In 1973, I was told that this is known as a slide area. They told us that 30 years ago."
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