Five years after mudslides, La Cañada residents see signs of recovery

In the early morning hours of Feb. 6, 2010, hundreds of La Cañada residents were startled out of their beds by the sound of the hillsides falling down around them.

City officials and residents knew such an occurrence was a likelihood. No sooner had flames from the Station fire — ignited in late August 2009 — been spotted than talk of the potential for severe mudslides began.

“As the flames were dying off and everything was still smoldering, the next thought was the hillsides are now burned and denuded, we need to think about what would happen when the debris came,” city administrator Kevin Chun recalled Tuesday. “There was really no rest. Right away, we went into post-fire mode, thinking about debris flow and what we needed to do to protect our community.”

Five years later, hillsides and the homes built there are showing signs of recovery. Last month, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works removed 123 K-rails on Ocean View Boulevard and finished construction of a $1.5-million drain pipe to divert rainwater from the Mullally debris basin to the Pickens Canyon wash.

Area residents say they are beginning to get closure on a disaster that, for years, upended their lives and sent them on a slow crawl toward restoration. But the memory of the chaos is etched in the minds of the people who survived it, and the civic leaders who helped see the community through it.

Pat Anderson, chief executive and president of the La Cañada Flintridge Chamber of Commerce and a Manistee Drive resident, remembered that day with vivid detail. She awoke to a cacophonous sound.

“What I saw was horrific,” she said. “A wall of water was coming over what used to be the roof of my garage. When I got halfway downstairs, all I could smell was earth and moisture. When I turned the light on, all I saw was mud and debris all over my house.”

Her garage, and car, slammed into her neighbors’ home, waking their teenage son. Minutes later, his bedroom was inundated with mud that might have buried him, Anderson recalled.

Then-mayor Laura Olhasso said she awoke that day at 5:30 a.m. feeling something wasn’t right.

“I woke my husband up and said, ‘We’ve got to go check things out. I’m just worried,’” she said, recounting how they dodged boulders and cars that had swept onto the roads. “You couldn’t even believe what you were looking at.”

The next day, in an emergency meeting of the City Council, leaders voted to allow affected homeowners to restore their houses, waiving the permit process. Later, as residents contacted insurance companies, Olhasso said the city began the onerous process of helping county agencies clear debris basins.

Edward Hitti, the city’s public works director, said officials worked with the Los Angeles County Flood Control District to increase the storage capacity at three of La Cañada’s nine catch basins.

“The risk of having (an event) similar to the February 6, 2010 mud flow is lesser now,” Hitti said in an email interview. “ The vegetation has substantially recovered; the storage capacity at Mullally DB was increased by 86%... and confidence is higher.”

Normanton Drive resident Gary Stibal, who evacuated his home with wife Diane 10 times in the course of the fire and rains that followed, said that while the Mullally drain pipe wouldn’t likely help his home, he feels confident the area has been secured.

“It’s looked like a war zone up here for five years, but with (county DPW) taking out the K-rails, we’re starting to get back to normal,” he added.

Most of the affected homes have been renovated and rebuilt, but some homeowners are still living with unfinished landscapes, pools and exteriors their insurance companies could not, or would not, pay for.

Anderson has spent the better part of the past five years fighting the California FAIR Plan Assn. to recover money she spent out of pocket to finish needed improvements.

For other homeowners, she offers this advice: “Make sure your policy is what you think it is, and have your agent explain it to you in detail,” she suggested. “And if your agent can’t or won’t explain it, find one who will.”

While Olhasso believes La Cañada’s civic leaders were as prepared as they could have been for the mudslides, she thinks there is now a better working relationship among public safety entities that fight fires. Chun, who helped lead the city’s incident command center, said staff learned how to communicate accurate information, and quickly.

“It was a trying experience for us, but I think we did learn from it,” he said.