Neighbors Join to Help Couple Turn Back Mud

STUDIO CITY — Joe and Ruth Lenorovitz had lost their battle to halt construction of a sprawling mansion on the steep hillside overlooking their back yard.

And Wednesday, the couple got mud rubbed in their wounds--tens of thousands of gallons of the stuff.

The two spent the day surveying their back yard, which was drenched from a mudslide they say was caused by grading for a nearly 10,000-square-foot mansion that they and neighbors had spent a year fighting at City Hall.

Mud barreled through a back-yard chain-link fence, swamping the newly landscaped back yard and filling their nine-foot-deep swimming pool before stopping inches short of their home.

“It was a hell of a mess,” said Joe Lenorovitz, 70, a retired wholesale supplier.

Ruth Lenorovitz, who has a heart condition, said she suffered palpitations when she saw the hillside come tumbling down. Like others caught in this week’s storm, the couple did not expect such a deluge--the worst, they say, in the 27 years they have lived in their Goodland Avenue house.

“The mud was rolling down like a mountainous waterfall,” said neighbor Nicky Noxon, one of dozens who pitched in to help the couple. “It was terrifying.”

Pat Damudar, owner of the hilltop property, said Wednesday it was weather, rather than any construction work, that caused the troubles. The grading work was done on a portion of his property that is not adjacent to the Lenorovitz house, he said.

“It just came sliding down,” Damudar said. “How can you fight nature?”

Joe Lenorovitz said he had a friendly chat with Damudar on Wednesday. Even though neighbors objected to the house--they said it was too big for the area and possibly unsafe--Damudar’s plans met city requirements and was approved more than a year ago.

Lenorovitz said he did not hold a grudge over losing the fight.

“I said as long as you are going to be up there, I want to be neighborly,” Lenorovitz said. “But one thing I want you to do is check your insurance.”

Beginning Tuesday morning, the rains attacked the hillside behind the Lenorovitz home, situated at the base of three gullies that point like the cross hairs of a rifle at the couple’s back yard. Lenorovitz said 12 years ago he had two troughs dug in the hillside and a chain-link fence installed to protect against slides.

But that did not help much Tuesday, when mud quickly overflowed the troughs, pushed down the fence and began piling up in the yard. Joe and Ruth Lenorovitz frantically called neighbors and soon a battalion of volunteers assembled at the house, piling up sandbags and digging makeshift channels to divert the mud stream.

“That’s when you know who your neighbors are,” Joe Lenorovitz said.

The neighbors struggled from morning to late afternoon, trying to divert the torrent to a drainage channel on the side of the yard.

One neighbor brought a new water pump that helped to partially drain the swimming pool.

Another neighbor, Peter Schick, said his wife called him from the Lenorovitz house up the block and asked for help. He said he ran to the couple’s house in his moccasins, wading into a river of muck and scaling the eroding hillside in a vain effort to divert the flow.

Schick explained his apparent heroism, saying: “Once you walk back there and see all your neighbors running around, well, you have to save face. Besides, it’s fun if it’s not your house. You get to play in the mud.”

The couple then called Hossein Akrany, a contractor who was repairing an estimated $50,000 in earthquake damage at the Lenorovitz house. Within hours, Akrany and a crew of three came to the Lenorovitz house and plunged into the onrushing mud.

The cascade of mud stopped inches before the last row of sandbags piled at the rear of the one-story house.

Inside, the couple had their furniture piled up in a rear room while the front of the house continues to undergo quake repairs. Wednesday, members of the L.A. Conservation Corps picked up where the neighbors left off, filling more sandbags and stacking them around the home.

Ruth Lenorovitz smiled when the sun finally peeked through clouds Wednesday afternoon. She hoped the worst was over.

“Thank God for our neighbors,” she said, her eyes tearing. “If not for them, I don’t know what we would have done.”