Disaster: Two additional houses are about to collapse. 'It's not some structure coming down a hill; it's about people,' homeowner says.
March 27, 1998 - Laguna Niguel - Two more hilltop houses were dangling over a steep ravine
Thursday, the ground slowly crumbling beneath them, on the same street where
three houses were destroyed last week in a landslide.
The failure of the hillside, which had been altered by engineers to give
homeowners impressive views, appeared to accelerate after Wednesday's rainstorms.
Among the residents and television crews gathered Thursday night to await
another kind of view, that of collapsing houses, was the owner of one of
them, Susan Olsson.
"You look at all these houses along here," Olsson said. "They
each have a family, they each have memories. They each have had holidays.
It's not some structure going down a hill; it's about people."
Olsson, who had watched her home bing built, said she also needed to
watch it fall to bring "closure" to her family's ordeal.
"Oh, yes, I have to see it hit the ground," she said. "It
would kill me if I didn't see it go after all this. It's like a relative.
I wouldn't be able to stand it if I just saw it on T.V."
Four other homes on Via Estoril also are considered doomed and have been
evacuated.
At the base of the crumbling hillside, the Crown Cove condominium complex
off Crown Valley Parkway also remains half evacuated after the initial landslide
on March 19 rushed five condo units, destroyed four others and threatened
12 more.
Meanwhile, documents in a lawsuit brought by the condo owners over the
slope failure show that in 1987, county official halted construction of
the homes that are now falling, while defects in the slope were investigated.
They allowed work to resume after developers obtained assurances about the
slope's safety from geologists.
Soil test now will be taken around the exclusive Niguel Summit subdivision
to determine the condition of the hills supporting nearly 1,500 homes, county
liaison Solveig Darner said.
American Geotechnical of San Diego, a firm working for the Niguel Summit
homeowners association, plans to drill a well that would enable geologists
to go down and inspect subsurface formations, Darner said.
The exploration would allow residents on streets above Via Estoril to
know whether there has been any movement of soil beneath their houses.
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