A State Of Instability

By J. Madeleine Nash With Reporting By Dan Cray/Laguna Beach and Laird Harrison/Oakland

I'll never forget in my life the noise I heard," says Gary Lemonoff, a house painter who lives near Laguna Beach, Calif. "There was a roar, my trailer started shaking, and rocks and mud and boulders and tree limbs went rolling across my driveway." When the roar stopped, in the blackness of the night Lemonoff could hear his neighbors screaming. For a time, it seemed that all had survived, including a 9-month-old baby someone miraculously plucked from the mud. But as the sun rose, Lemonoff spotted a foot and forearm protruding from a pile of mud and rubble just outside his trailer. The lifeless limbs belonged to Glenn Flook, a 25-year-old man who had been swept more than 150 yards from the house where he had been staying. Another body was found a day later.

California cliff and canyon dwellers might as well get ready for more devastation. Up and down the coastline, hundreds of hillsides are starting to slump and slide. And the reason, say experts, is simple. Weeks of relentless rain have saturated not just the top few inches of soil but also underlying layers of bedrock, causing structural weakening deep down. By itself, waterlogged ground is a nuisance. Combined with California's mountainous terrain, says Doug Morton of the U.S. Geological Survey in Riverside, Calif., it can very quickly add up to disaster. Imagine living on the edge of a steep, quivering pile of chocolate pudding. "Mother Nature doesn't like steep slopes," says Morton, "and she does what she can to lower them."

What happened at Laguna Beach last week happened at Loma Mar and Rio Nido a couple of weeks before, as torrents of mud filled with debris smashed into dwellings with terrifying force. No one died in the Rio Nido slide, but homeowner Gary LaCombe feels lucky to be alive. He vividly remembers watching a tree's mammoth root ball, 12 ft. in diameter, hurtle toward his kitchen window, then veer off at the last minute, narrowly missing his house. Now LaCombe, along with his wife Phyllis and a few hundred of his neighbors, has been evacuated by county officials, barred from returning home because geologists fear that an even larger slide may follow. Says LaCombe, who was forced to leave his job with a metal wholesale company in order to cope with the crisis: "I have lost absolutely everything in my life--except my wife."

Technically, the landslides that hit Laguna Beach, Loma Mar and Rio Nido are known as debris flows. These are shallow slides that involve only the top layer of soil and usually occur during rainstorms. Debris flows are dangerous; they can run at speeds as high as 40 m.p.h., far faster than a person can run. Fortunately, most debris flows funnel through fairly narrow channels, and so the damage they inflict is limited. But Californians are at risk for a second type of slide, which the U.S. Geological Survey's David Howell refers to as a "bedrock landslide." Such deep-seated slides move slowly and pose little hazard to life (unless, as happened in Rio Nido, they also trigger debris flows). In their own way, however, bedrock slides are equally pernicious.

Just ask investment banker Mark Ragsdale and his wife Leslie, a lawyer, who last October bought a beautiful two-story house north of San Francisco in Mill Valley, up a road that wound through 100-ft. redwoods and past a splashing stream. Then the winter rains started. Toward the end of January, the couple's driveway had started to heave. A week later, the house began to torque and twist so that windows cracked and doors hung askew. "You'd better get out," city inspectors advised. Within two hours, the Ragsdales and two dozen friends started filing in and out of the house like ants, loading a truck with the couple's possessions. A short time later, the Ragsdales were forced to demolish their house so that it would not slide into their neighbor's below.

During the coming months, scenes like this are likely to repeat themselves many times over. Thanks to El Nino, still more storms are expected to savage California well into spring. Once the weather improves, debris flows will end. But bedrock landslides won't dissipate until the waterlogged hillsides drain. Long after sparkling sunshine has replaced sullen skies, experts warn, Californians are likely to find their property slip-sliding away.

--With reporting by Dan Cray/Laguna Beach and Laird Harrison/Oakland