Hillside Homes

A cocker-poodle mix that apparently went down a hill two days ago and became entangled in the bushes off the edge of a Hollywood Hills home was rescued Wednesday. After two days spent in the wild -- or at least in some thick brush between hillside homes -- Bentley was finally discovered. A Los Angeles city firefighter was lowered down to the dog and was able to round him up. The owner says she will take Bentley to the vet to get checked out, but the dog appeared to be uninjured by his adventure.

A San Bernardino County couple had to evacuate their home Tuesday when a freak landslide swept away part of the hill under the structure. A giant section of earth -- about 30 feet wide, 15 feet long and 150 feet deep -- collapsed beneath a Grand Terrace hillside home shortly before 8 a.m., authorities said. The ground beneath the expansive home's garage and rear patio slid down the 300-foot cliff the home rests on, said San Bernardino County fire Capt. Ed Noble. The patio and garage, however, did not actually collapse.

In anticipation of sustained rainfall, firefighters Tuesday were monitoring five hillside homes declared uninhabitable. Three homes in the 10700 block of Cranks Road and two in the 5700 block of Tellefson Road were red-tagged Saturday after the ground began sliding. All residents were safely evacuated; none of the homes have major structural damage, fire officials said.

A cocker-poodle mix that apparently went down a hill two days ago and became entangled in the bushes off the edge of a Hollywood Hills home was rescued Wednesday. After two days spent in the wild -- or at least in some thick brush between hillside homes -- Bentley was finally discovered. A Los Angeles city firefighter was lowered down to the dog and was able to round him up. The owner says she will take Bentley to the vet to get checked out, but the dog appeared to be uninjured by his adventure.

I read with interest your March 29 editorial "Natural Tests of Judgment." As the president of a homeowners association whose units were significantly impacted by a hillside failure on Dec. 6, I have made many surprising discoveries in the last four months. In 1993 I bought a townhouse in a new 16-unit complex on a hillside in Costa Mesa. I accept that with the well-publicized disasters California has suffered I knew there was some risk in buying a house on a hill. However, I believe that when buying a property, a consumer has the right to assume that city officials have insisted that developers follow city laws and that they have enforced their own building codes and regulations.

In a victory for Glenoaks Canyon homeowners who oppose further hillside development, the Glendale Planning Commission voted 4 to 0 Monday against allowing construction of a 25-house tract off Sleepy Hollow Place. The commission's recommendation will be considered by the Glendale City Council at a special meeting scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 1, at City Hall.

A 30-acre brush fire Thursday night briefly threatened several hillside homes in a densely populated area of east Orange, fire officials said. About 25 firefighting units, two bulldozers and a helicopter from fire departments in Orange and neighboring cities, as well as the county, were dispatched to the fire, which threatened homes east of Rancho Santiago Boulevard and north of Chapman Avenue in Orange. In all, 93 firefighters fought the blaze. The fire broke out about 7:30 p.m.

Developers of a controversial subdivision of luxury hillside homes in Glenmore Canyon tried to win support Monday for a new, scaled-down version of the project, which was buried under community opposition three years ago. "Compared to what we proposed in the past, we've taken a real hard look at the project and made numerous concessions," said Rick Hauser, vice president of Irvine-based Polygon Communities, who met with members of the Glendale Homeowners Coordinating Council.

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday imposed temporary restrictions on single-family home construction in an eight-mile stretch of the Santa Monica Mountains where city officials say building on narrow roads has created safety problems. The restrictions, proposed by Councilmen Michael Woo and Zev Yaroslavsky, are expected to severely limit home construction on the hillsides south of Mulholland Drive between the San Diego Freeway and Outpost Drive, covering an area from Bel-Air to the Hollywood Hills.

Developers hoping to build houses in rugged Topanga Canyon may soon discover that a mathematician is as important to their projects as an architect, a geologist or a slope engineer. Los Angeles County officials have unveiled a complicated formula that they plan to use to determine how large houses can be in a mountainous area. County planners are reacting to canyon dwellers' complaints that oversized homes are being built on tiny hillside cabin lots left over from 1920s-era subdivisions.

Of more than 100 houses that Ray Kappe designed over his long and distinguished career, the one he designed for himself and his family in Los Angeles' Rustic Canyon is the most important. "Maybe the greatest house in Southern California," Stephen Kanner, the former president of American Institute of Architects' Los Angeles chapter, said in a 2008 interview. Indeed, that year, when the Home section polled architects, historians, academics and critics on Southern California's best houses of all time, the 1967 Kappe residence ranked No. 8, just behind Chemosphere by John Lautner and the Gamble House by Charles and Henry Greene.

Stephen and Mashid Rizzone long planned on creating a fully "green" dream home and impart a legacy of environmental responsibility to their children. Toward that end, 168 solar panels were installed in May on the back of the Rizzones' hillside Newport Beach home, facing the northeast side of Balboa Island. And although the panels may indeed be environmentally responsible, they are also imparting a lot of glare on the island neighbors. "I'm all for going green, and I'm not trying to stop anyone from having solar panels," said Bob Olson, who says the porch of his Balboa Island home is now subjected to an intense glare for 2 1/2 hours a day because of the Rizzones' solar panels.

The predawn pounding on his front door woke Henrik Hairapetian from a sound sleep. It was a neighbor saying that an elderly woman down the street was trapped in a flooded house. Outside, rain fell in sheets. A basin on a La Cañada Flintridge hillside was overflowing, sending torrents of mud and water onto homes along Bristow Drive and Ocean View Boulevard. Hairapetian, 40, threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and ran to 86-year-old Ann Rouman's house three doors down. "The woman's daughter was outside screaming, 'She's in the back!

It was your typical 1960s stucco home -- like thousands of others just like it on the streets of Southern California. What sold Sascha Jovanovic was not the home itself, but its breathtaking view. "I knew I could fix the house," Jovanovic says, "but you can't install a view." So he bought the Brentwood house, which steps down a Santa Monica Mountains hillside and opens to Malibu-to-Palos Verdes views, and he lived with uninspired architecture and an insufficient carport for five years before calling L.A. architect Lorcan O'Herlihy.

The first of several powerful storms rumbled across Southern California on Monday, prompting evacuations in mudslide-prone foothill areas, knocking out power for tens of thousands of people and causing havoc on flooded streets and highways. Consecutive storms are expected each day through Thursday, with the biggest systems forecast to arrive after today. "Wednesday and Thursday will be the big hit," said Bill Hoffer, a spokesman with the National Weather Service's Oxnard office.

As darkness fell on Haiti's capital Wednesday, crowds sought out the relative safety of the streets and open spaces. In a hillside neighborhood just above downtown Port-au-Prince, they gathered under a spectacularly starry sky. And they sang. Like a huge school choir, earthquake survivors broke out in loud communal song, a soothing sound in a city with no power, little water and untold numbers of bodies hidden in rubble or strewn along the roadsides. But the songs turned to screams as a strong aftershock hit, shaking the buildings that survived the magnitude 7.0 earthquake Tuesday and jolting the streets.

The Los Angeles City Planning Commission, concerned about fire safety in hillside neighborhoods, has approved temporary restrictions on construction in the Santa Monica Mountains that would make it more difficult to build homes on narrow dirt roads. In a last-minute decision, however, the commission voted Thursday to exempt dozens of projects that meet certain criteria--a move that brought sharp criticism from proponents of tough controls.

Residents will get a chance at 7 p.m. Tuesday to voice their opinions to the City Council about the latest version of a controversial development plan for the city's hillsides. Santa Fe Energy Resources, which owns the once oil-rich land, wants to build 763 homes, a school and parks on 284 acres north of Carbon Canyon Road and east of Valencia Avenue. The plan has been scaled back several times in answer to residents' complaints that the proposal would bring more noise and traffic to the area.

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, and Mexico City -- The capital of Haiti lay in ruins Wednesday, shattered by an earthquake it was not built to withstand. With most international aid yet to arrive, bodies lined the streets, the injured gathered at hospitals devoid of doctors or functioning equipment, swaths of the city were reduced to rubble and even the presidential palace -- long a symbol of whatever stability the country could muster -- was damaged and sagging. Most telecommunications were down, making it next to impossible for the government and aid agencies to count the casualties or assess the extent of damage from the magnitude 7.0 quake that struck Tuesday afternoon.

It was near midnight Monday, and Larry Peabody looked toward a leading flank of the giant Station fire as it advanced over a ridge in the Angeles National Forest, marching toward the Mt. Wilson Observatory. "We can't stop the head of the fire," said Peabody, a fuels battalion chief for the U.S. Forest Service, as he stood in the darkness on the bottom of Mt. Wilson Road, a narrow switchback off the Angeles Crest Highway that is the only paved road into and out of the peak-hugging observatory compound.