One of San Diego’s most prestigious places to live turned into a nightmare Wednesday when a Mount Soledad hillside collapsed, damaging homes, leading to two heart attacks and one accident, said Jamie Fox Rice with the office of District 2 City Councilman Kevin Faulconer.
Soledad Mountain Road at Desert View Drive, which had been having slippage problems for a while, collapsed early Oct. 3. Residents who were forced to evacuate learned the hard way that their homes had a history of landslides dating back to 1961.
According to Maurice Luque of the San Diego Fire Rescue Department, nine homes are beyond repair. Eight are so damaged that the owners can only enter during the day, and 44 others are “tagged” for utility issues, such as broken sewer or water lines. There is no estimate yet of a dollar amount for the damages.
The hillsides behind these houses had been slipping into the alley for several years now but they didn’t know it was this bad, said Battalion Chief Bruce Cartelli with the San Diego Fire Department
At about 9 a.m. Wednesday, Engine Company 16 received a call that the street was “open” a few inches. Coincidentally, the fire department was already on its way to the scene because battalion chiefs and commanders wanted to assess the situation and craft a disaster plan in case the homes that seemed to be in danger on Mount Soledad slid down the hill, Cartelli said.
Over the past few months, several homes on the mountain had slid slightly downhill, causing engineers to visit the area the day before while utility workers checked for stress in telephone and electric lines.
“Now we have a catastrophe,” Cartelli said.
When fire department personnel arrived, they learned they no longer needed a backup plan because their fears were justified. As of Wednesday, officials said so many homes had moved or were damaged from the sliding hillside that they had to close down the 5700 block of Soledad Mountain Road indefinitely. Beryl Street will be used to reroute all traffic on Soledad Mountain Road.
Officials arriving at the scene cut through the affected homes’ rooftops. Reports of a water main break are false, Rice said, because the water had already been shut off. However, there was a gas leak, so gas was shut off and SDG&E began working on the leak.
“This is the worst landfall slide I’ve seen in 36 years in the fire service,” Cartelli said.
Although the official evacuation time was not until 11:15 a.m., when the Red Cross set up a temporary evacuation area at Kate Sessions Park, residents on Desert View Drive and Palomino Circle at Soledad Mountain Road were forced to leave their homes following the incident.
Three blocks around the parameter have been evacuated, Cartelli said.
One Desert View Drive resident was forced to leave her home shortly after 9 a.m. without any belongings. She searched until she found a cell phone to call her husband.
“I can’t even remember my husband’s number. I’ve dialed it like three times, said Daisy Crompton, as she called her husband to tell him their home is OK and that she was forced to evacuate. “Thank god I didn’t leave a child in there, or something.”
Other residents tried to cross a police barricade on Soledad Mountain Road at Pacifica to reach their homes, but were immediately stopped. Although officially they were merely told “it was a bad idea” to go inside their homes, no one was allowed to cross the police line.
A photo from December of 1961 showed Soledad Mountain when the homes were being built, said geologist Patt Abbott.
“It’s not a sinkhole,” Abbott said. “It’s a slide that happened when the homes were first being built. An unstable mass of earth sits on a slope of earth, then slides down the hill.”
Cracked water pipes did not cause the slide, Abbott said. Most of Mount Soledad is a stable, nice place to live but there are a couple of places on Mount Soledad “you just don’t want to build,” he said.
When the developer first built the homes, in 1961, the homes slid down the hill while being built. The city told some residents they weren’t going to rebuild, said Lillie Nelson, who bought her home on Pacifica Drive in December of 1961.
“It was a very wet winter in 1961,” she said. “There were 42 homes built on clay. When the rain came, the new houses came down with it and the hillside just collapsed on Desert View Drive. Back then, they weren’t required to drill before they built.”
“I have a good memory,” she added. “And I remember that the city told me there was not to be any building there. But they did. I wouldn’t buy anywhere from the cross on down.
“To me, it was a no-brainer. They never should’ve been built.”