Homeowners Find Slides Are as Old as the Hills

Steven Cser, a chiropractor in Orange, knew nothing of the violent, rocky spasms millions of years ago that helped form the tangled layer-cake of rocks and sand beneath the subdivision lot where he bought an upscale home 12 years ago.

And when chunks of his backyard began sinking into the earth a few months ago, it was news to Cser and dozens of neighbors, even as they began evacuating, that they lived on the site of large, long-ago landslides that may have awakened.

It’s a familiar story, often repeated in California, from the Santa Monica Mountains to the peninsular ranges. Enamored of the view and value, Southern California home buyers purchase hillside and ridge top property now being built at rapid rates. And when the ground that nature whisked together slips and the houses begin falling, they are aghast.

“There are buyers who aren’t being protected,” said Serge Tomassian, an Irvine attorney and former head of the construction defects section of the Orange County Bar Assn. “People are buying homes, unknowingly, that have a history of problems--landslides, slope movements, other problems.”

Because of that, Tomassian and others are asking for stricter state disclosure laws governing what home buyers must be told about the property they are purchasing.

A year after an El Nino storm season that forced the evacuation of more than 1,000 homes and damaged hundreds along the California coast, landslide victims, attorneys and others have begun speaking up for better protections in laws or regulations.

They include better disclosure, improved city and county oversight of building, state involvement in insurance issues, and better building standards.

“There needs to be even more attention paid by the contractors and builders to their construction means and methods,” said Tom Chesley, a Laguna Hills contractor critical of some “mass production” home building projects.

“When we see people outside the sales office in sleeping bags and tents waiting for the opening of Phase I, what do you think is going to happen with Phase II?” Chesley asked.

Advocates of home buyer protection legislation said the climate in California--natural and political--has tilted in favor of changes.

“The interest on the part of consumers is still strong,” said Assemblyman Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch), the sponsor of California’s Natural Hazard Disclosure Statement Act, which passed in 1997 as a reaction to catastrophic flooding in Northern California.

That law requires sellers of property to provide a separate form indicating whether state maps classify the property as potentially endangered by hazards of wildfire, river flooding, dam inundation or earthquakes.

The January 1997 flooding that damaged or destroyed 23,000 houses, was the impetus behind the new disclosure requirements, Torlakson said.

“We had a lot of property owners who were surprised and said they didn’t know they were in a flood plain,” he said. “I became convinced it’s important to have more information available.”

The law resulting from Torlakson’s bill doesn’t require disclosure of past landslides or mudslides if they aren’t related to a local earthquake hazard zone. Torlakson said he will consider adding protection against landslides to the law. Landslide victims who later learn their projects were built on or near preexisting landslides, or above ancient landslides that were flattened, filled or buttressed with earthen berms, almost universally complain that they weren’t told in advance about the damaged land.

“Where there are ancient landslides, it ought to be disclosed to everyone,” said Mike DeStefano, a former resident of the doomed Crown Cove condominiums in Laguna Niguel, where all 41 units will be demolished after a March 1998 landslide.

“It should be right there on a piece of paper for everyone to see,” he said. “People should read it and then sign something saying they read it and understood it.”