A year slides away

The sun shone brightly Thursday, the first anniversary of one of the darkest days in Laguna’s history.

Early in the morning of June 1, 2005, a hillside in Bluebird Canyon ruptured, devastating the lives of families who watched their homes wrenched from foundations, split asunder or tumbling into the oblivion. More than 1,000 people were evacuated safely, but 21 homes were damaged, 12 of them beyond repair.

“It was the darkest day of my life, but gosh, imagine if I had a really sick kid or someone had died,” Todd McCallum said. “I’ve learned this past year that as important as your home is, it’s not the most important thing.”

McCallum said his most graphic memory of the landslide is the 5 p.m. news conference when he learned that his home was red-tagged, unsafe to enter. The house survived, still uninhabitable a year later, but repairable.

McCallum, his wife, Stefani, and their two daughters, Sarah and Jessica, are waiting only for the hillside behind their home on Bluebird Canyon Drive to be sufficiently shored up so they can begin restoration.

Some of the McCallum’s Bluebird Canyon neighbors are already back in their homes, some plan to go back when the reconstructed hillside is deemed safe and some, including Lewis and Kay Wright who have settled in Laguna Woods, might never return.

Certainly, none of their lives will ever be the same.

“I leaned that power of the community is pretty impressive when everyone works together,” McCallum said. “The day after the slide, Dale Ghere told us to we had to meet the problem head-on and get the story out to the public.

“Nobody wanted to talk to the media, but he said we had to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and act. And he was right.”

To this day, many people think federal, state or taxpayers money will be used to rebuild homes. Not so. It is all to be used to rebuild public facilities and safeguards. Unlike the folks who lost their homes in the 1993 fire, property owners whose houses are damaged or destroyed in a landslide have no insurance to fall back on. None is available in California.

Ghere knew whereof he spoke when he talked early-on to the devastated families. He had experienced the same loss of home and neighborhood decades before in a landslide in another section of Bluebird Canyon, which was rebuilt stronger and more quickly due to his unwavering commitment to the recovery.

“And, of course,” McCallum said, “Elizabeth [Mayor Pearson-Schneider] is not your average politician.”

Pearson-Schneider attended the first meeting of the displaced families and comforted them with promises of the city’s support. Within 10 days, she had organized the Adopt-a-Landslide Family fund, which has lent financial support to the hapless homeowners.

Money from the fund is used to alleviate families’ pressing needs ? such as the recent birth of the Stephen Huberty family’s baby.

“Financial assistance must continue for those families still in need,” said Planning Commissioner Anne Johnson, co-chair of the fund-raising committee.

She praised the efforts of committee members Kimberly Norton, Michele Falkowski, Elizabeth Cominsky and Pamela Simpson; architect Morris Skenderian; city staff; and Laguna’s emergency personnel, who forged special relations with some of the families they helped to safety (See story, Page A11).

“I have been truly impressed by the courage of people who have endured so much,” Johnson said. “Lew Geiser [who died in April] was absolutely remarkable, although he was facing death. Bob Power, who lost everything, underwent a second cancer operation.

“It seems sometimes as though we asked the same people in town to give ? over and over again ? and they respond, but truly the fund-raising for the landslide families was a widespread city effort.”

Community support extended to approval of a sales tax increase to help fund infrastructure repairs, estimated at $12-$18 million.

“Bluebird Canyon was always a close community ? we dearly loved our neighbors, how the mayor came through and the financial help ? the community didn’t abandon us,” Madison Place homeowner Donna Schnell said.

Schnell and her husband, Paul, have been back in their home since January.

Vera Machado Martinez was able to return to her Madison Place home in March, forever grateful to her community.

“I always had heard about Laguna being a really supportive community, but I wasn’t here during the fire and hadn’t experienced the community coming together ? people just calling and asking if they could do anything,” she said.

“Laguna really does open its arms. I think everyone I had ever met called to offer me a place to stay. It was quite amazing.”

Pearson-Schneider said people in Laguna really want to help.

“For the most part, people have good hearts,” the mayor said. “Even the most hard-hearted Republicans in Orange County came up to me and said they were so proud of the way we responded to the disaster and helped people.”

The landslide showed a side of Pearson-Schneider that many in the community had never seen ? a side of her can-do, just-get-over-it personality ? and one she never expected to surface.

“It made me more sympathetic than I ever thought I would be,” Pearson-Schneider said. “Some nights I just lay in bed crying, something I never expected to do.

“I became more empathetic because I was witnessing people in such pain and suffering. It broke my heart in ways my heart had never been broken before.”

For some of the families, the pain continues.

Mortgage payments are still being paid on homes that no longer exist or cannot be lived in. It will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild from scratch and no small amount just to restore.

McCallum was approved for a federal Small Business Administration loan, which will help him repair his home, but the low-interest $200,000 he will get is probably only enough for foundations for rebuilds.

But at least one property owner was told higher loans could be available on a case-by-case basis.

And the extent of the hillside and infrastructure restoration has kept families out of their homes longer than was anticipated a year ago.

Community recovery coordinator Bob Burnham sure didn’t expect to be on the job this long.

“But knowing everything, I know today, I would do it again,” Burnham said.

The retired Newport Beach city attorney said he has learned more about his community than he ever knew from all the years he lived here but worked in another town.

“I never would have met the people I did and it has been very rewarding,” Burnham said. “I always respected [City Manager Ken Frank], but I respect him even more now.”

Thursday night, McCallum planned to join other landslide families at a get-together in Laguna Canyon, where four mobile homes create a micro-Bluebird Canyon neighborhood for Lori Jo Herek and Billy De Blasi; Steven Howard and his daughter Breanna; John and Diane Stevens and their children Haley and Luc; and Laurel and Howard “Tripp” Meister and their children, Haile and Ty.

Of the four in the compound, only the Meisters’ home is repairable.

“It’s been rough year for most of us,” Meister said. “We just keep going deeper in debt, paying our mortgage and everyday expenses, but we just have to take it one day at a time.

“After I got [mad] at life for handing me a lemon, I decided to make lemonade.”

He plans to restore his home himself, helped by his father-in-law to keep the construction as cheap as possible.

Thursday was a bit surreal for Meister, seeing pictures of the slide back on the front page of a daily newspaper.

“The party will be a chance for us to get back together,” Meister said.

They’ll have a lot to talk about.

“It has been weird. It is still weird, probably because I haven’t committed completely to moving back.

“But I am beginning to see the bright light at the end of the tunnel.”cpt.02-landslide-3-BPhotoInfoBE1RI60020060602inwygbknSTAFF / COASTLINE PILOT(LA)David Hagen and Kim Jensen, pictured last year, cut boards for a new staircase in a home devastated by the slide in Bluebird Canyon. cpt.02-landslide-1-CPhotoInfoS01RHEG420060602ihh129knDON LEACH / COASTLINE PILOT(LA)Viewed from Summit Drive last year, the slide zone reveals the sharp incline where homes slid from Flamingo Drive.