Still Buried

Published in the Indie June 2, 2005.

LA CONCHITA SURVIVORS LIVE UNDER THE SHADOW OF JANUARY'S MUDSLIDE

On January 10, 2005, 465,000 tons of earth barreled down the slope above La Conchita during record-breaking storms, killing 10 people. It's been nearly five months since Charly Womack, 51; Mechelle Wallet, 37; Hannah Wallet, 10; Raven Wallet, 6; Paloma Wallet, 2; Tony Alvis, 53; Vanessa Bryson, 28; Christina Kennedy, 45; John Morgan, 56; Patrick Rodreick, 47; and three dogs: Blue, Dharma, and Bailey, were lost to family and friends, neighbors and survivors.
Wednesday, May 11.

Tonight is Coriander Womack's 28th birthday and her dad isn't there. And instead of the usual party she'd have at her dad's house in La Conchita, with music and beer and tons of good food, the party is in Carpinteria, where her sister, brother, and six others have been living in a two-bedroom house since the January 10 slides - since her father, Charly Womack, died at 51.
Cori isn't one of the eight living there (at the time, inhabitants include Jimmie Wallet, his surviving 17-year-old daughter Jasmine, Isaiah Womack and fiancée Brie Brazelton, Brie's twin sister Annie and her boyfriend Griffin), but 14-year-old Tessa Womack is. And Tessa is trying to get some alone time on a school night - no easy feat when your bedroom is the hallway.
"I'm going to shoot somebody if I don't get my own room," Tessa screams, as someone's child chases someone else's child through her room in a game of tag, slamming doors and laughing. "I hate this!"
Most days, Tessa is pretty even-keeled. She may have been seen wailing in newspaper photographs after her father's body was found in the rubble, but since then she's been strong, even stoic. Her family is both impressed with, and worried about, how little she cries.
"I'm worried it hasn't quite hit her," says Annette Russell, Tessa's aunt and unofficial stand-in for her absent mother. (It was to Annette and Brie Brazelton that Tessa gave gifts on Mother's Day.) "It can take years for it to hit."
Annie Brazelton, Brie's 25-year-old twin and Tessa's unofficial sister, says Tessa's emotion comes out other ways, when she's annoyed about something else. Then Tessa blows up, or breaks into tears - like she is tonight.
Looking at the house, where every room has been converted into living space and the only escape is a small, fenced-in yard out front, it's hard to imagine these blowups don't happen more often. Life's hard enough, for any teenager. Add losing a parent, several friends, and a home to the mix - then put that teen into a crowded house full of grieving people only slightly older than she - and things could seem downright unbearable.
Not that life in La Conchita was ever what most of us would call "normal." Tessa lived with most of these people then, too, and a constant, rotating group of visitors who still call themselves the "La Conchita Llamas" or the "Llama Tribe." But there, everyone had a living space of their own, and there was always space to be alone.
"There was the bus, the street, you could go into a corner," says Annie, who shared a converted school bus with her boyfriend Griffin when they lived with Charly. Now the couple sleeps in the living room in Carpinteria.
Brie, who shared an upstairs room with Isaiah in Charly's house, where she'd just finished painting the walls red, gold-leafing the trim and putting in a new pine-frame bed, agreed. "Here, it's just a circle," she says.

Toil and Trouble
For the Llama Tribe and other survivors, the grieving is ongoing, daily. Money remains tight; disaster funds only cover immediate needs for shelter and clothing, while additional assistance has been hard to come by because many of the tribe used to work for Charly's contracting business, and therefore didn't have pay stubs to qualify for loans. Because of complicated trust fund rules, Isaiah had to go to the bank three times to get money from one of the well-publicized family funds just to buy a mattress; Jimmie Wallet often can't get enough money from those funds for gas.
Griffin, whose leg was smashed during the slide, still owes $9,000 in medical bills. Annie, who cared for him during his injury, lost her job as a special-education teacher at La Colina Jr. High School for missing too many days. Brie, who was notorious for cooking huge meals for the family and was taking culinary classes at Santa Barbara City College, lost her interest in cooking.
And some of the telltale symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome - a psychological disorder famous for affecting war vets with flashbacks, nightmares, and constant fear - are cropping up among family members. When the phone rings, everyone jumps. When Brie accidentally stepped on bubble wrap, the noise scared her so badly, Annie had to comfort her. Annie is terrified of driving. Brie wakes up with panic attacks, and is irrationally afraid that her new puppy will be kidnapped.
At home, things still feel temporary. Annie and Griffin's room still serves as a communal meeting space. Jimmie Wallet lives in a room the size of a closet with two distinct features: branches on the ceiling that make it seem like he's sleeping underground, and a bed sized for one. And while Tessa's no longer sleeping in the converted dining room/hallway, sometimes her brother, Orion Womack, 27, crashes there. As does Justin Pierson, 14-year-old brother to the Brazelton twins. Justin stayed in La Conchita with their father for a while, but now retreats to Carpinteria when he can.
Justin knows what he wants: "A place where we can relax, make a home for ourselves - a sturdy home - so people won't look and say, 'Hey, there's the people on the news.'" More troubling, the generous donation of four months' free rent is up in August, when the owner plans to sell the house to build condos. By the end of the summer, the family will be homeless again. They're looking for a plot of land near Carpinteria, Ojai, or Santa Barbara where they can put down permanent roots. But even that isn't the ideal solution. Isaiah Womack, notoriously quiet and wearing his dad's gentle smile under sad eyes, says he just wants to go home. "I want the hill fixed," says the 24-year-old new patriarch of this displaced, extended family. "I want to move back to La Conchita."
But it doesn't appear Isaiah is going to get his wish anytime soon. Since the slide nearly five months ago, very little has changed in La Conchita. The gas station that served as a meeting place for residents and a watering hole for commuters is still closed. The physical signs of the slide are still there - the mounds of earth where the houses used to be, the small stream of water seeping from the mountain that still floods Zelzah Street with two feet of mud when it rains, the condemned houses standing askew behind metal fences, and the two-story home with boards barely covering a school bus-sized hole and the crushed remains of a green Chevy Tahoe. The canyon above town, where the mud flowed from the mountain, remains a bare, raw, open wound.
And county employees say it's going to stay that way, at least for the time being. They don't want to do anything until several lawsuits against them, still not yet filed, are resolved. There are greater questions about what should be done with the beachside hamlet.
According to geologists, the area is still another landslide waiting to happen. With a hillside made of weak sedimentary rocks, a history of landslides going back to prehistoric times, a unique geological make-up that has the land rising up from the water at a rate only rivaled by areas in Alaska or the Himalayas, and a climate that's prone to periods of prolonged, intense rainfall, geologists such as UCSB graduate student Jeff Hemphill consider it impossible to "fix" the hill for any length of time.
Even if the county decided to build terraces, drainpipes, and retaining walls to attempt such a fix, it may not be in its jurisdiction to do so; the land technically belongs to La Conchita Ranch, making the issue a private property dispute between the sole landowner above the slide and numerous landowners beneath it. Deciding to step in would open the door to the question of Ventura County's liability. By fixing the hill, would they be accepting responsibility for the slide that damaged nine homes in 1995? For the destruction and deaths in 2005? For whatever may happen if the "fix" doesn't hold during another rainstorm? If so, the potential cost of those lawsuits far outweighs the estimated $30 million it would cost to fix the hill now, a price that would hardly be offset by real estate taxes on less than 200 homes now only worth $300,000 or less.
It's a dilemma from which no one seems to know a way out. And it's been further complicated by the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger, during his visit on January 12, promised to allocate funds to help rebuild the community. Though a well-meaning gesture, the governor's offer may have overlooked the complex issues involved with completing such a task - and, in the process, painted the county, which hasn't taken the money or fixed the hill, as the bad guy.
"I've about had it with the county," says Ray Gann, who operates the produce stand Stranded Market in the parking lot of the gas station. "We're the bastard stepchild."

Paradise Lost, Not Forgotten
One block from where most of the victims were found, Gann and his 6-year-old son Christopher use sandbags and shovels to direct a small stream of water - and its accompanying swamp of mud - into a trench in front of their house. There's little hope of removing the wood planks bridging their front porch and the street anytime soon, but Gann hopes at least to limit the moat to the ditch, instead of the whole street. This is only a fair-weather fix.
"When the weather's bad, we're screwed," says Gann, wearing jean shorts, a black T-shirt, and flip-flops. But he has no plan to pick up and move. Though he was offered federal funding to relocate, it was only $1,375 - hardly enough to move his family of three to Barstow, he says. "I lost about that much just in food from my refrigerator when the power went out."
Mike Bell, the 57-year-old chairman of the La Conchita Community Organization (LCCO), says many surviving homeowners qualify for a mere $200,000 to buy another home - a meager sum that would force them to relocate to places like the Mojave Desert or Lompoc, far from family, friends, and the ocean view they've come to consider home.
And that doesn't take into account their emotional ties to La Conchita. There are some, like 23-year La Conchita resident Russ Brazelton, who believe staying put is worth the risk.
"All it takes is a good La Conchita day and everyone knows why we're still here," says Russ, 54 - father to Justin Pierson and twins Annie and Brie - who recently moved back to La Conchita after sleeping on the kitchen floor of the Carpinteria house for several weeks. If the hill falls again in another decade and kills him, the 54-year-old says, "Ten years in this paradise is better than 20 years of just satisfactory living."
Other survivors are buying up property for cheap, says Prudential realtor Marcy Cutting, planning to use them as summer homes or betting on the chance the hill will be fixed. Two of those homes are directly across from the mud piles where the bodies were found.
And from atop one of those piles, it's not hard to understand why people want to be there. The view from La Conchita's ground zero is gorgeous: the ocean stretching out below, the horizon clear. The slide area is surrounded by blooming mustard and lavender bushes, orange poppies, and lush, baby banana trees. The breeze is refreshing, not cold. Sometimes, the highway falls silent for a moment. If you didn't know you were standing on a hill that was part gravesite, part memorial, you might even call it idyllic.
But it's impossible to forget what lies beneath the wildflowers and mounds of earth. The dips between the hills are where bulldozers searched for bodies. Even the flowers are a reminder; friends and family of victims planted 600 pounds of seeds since January 10, in an effort to make something good and beautiful out of a tragedy that took their friends and fathers, a wife and three tiny children, and an entire way of life they fear is lost forever.
The slide area is ringed by fences hung with daisy chains, stuffed animals, letters, and wind chimes. Someone has spray-painted red hearts over the laminated "Warning" signs. Red tape is strung to the fence, spelling "Happy Birthday Paloma" - the youngest Wallet girl would have had her third birthday last month. And here, on the hill, is a small shrine: a cross, a child's play tent, a bench, a pinwheel, a weathervane wearing a cymbal from slide victim Charly Womack's drum set. A friend of the family cut stairs into the mound, leading to the shrine, but few survivors are able to venture past the fence. Even Annette Russell, Tessa's aunt, hasn't been to the shrine yet.
"I can't," she says, eyes welling up. "It's so hard. That's where I'd walk in the door, and music would be playing, and food would be cooking ..."
For Charly Womack's friend Maya Jamal, though, visiting the spot is comforting. Charly's house was always magical for her, and this spot is still sacred. She also finds irony in its beauty. "We always wanted a better view of the ocean," says Jamal. "Now we have it - but without the house."
Behind her, in a divot left by tractors and bulldozers searching for victims, Russ works steadily. The spindly, sun-worn, longtime friend of Charly has appointed himself groundskeeper of the disaster-area-turned-shrine; Russ spends entire days irrigating the flowers with a neighbor's borrowed water and clearing mustard away so the poppies can thrive. He hopes to turn the divot into a temporary gathering space for family and friends, complete with the soon-to-be-repaired teepee Charly used to live in - which happens to be exactly the same size as the hole.
"I'm doing this now to keep from going out of my mind," Russ says, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette, sitting beneath a lean-to he made from a door and part of the wall to which it's still hinged. "I'm about as lost and spun out as a person can get. I feel like I died in that slide, too."

To make contributions to the Womacks or Wallets, visit the Web site girlmanmedia.com for information on donations (including cash, land, musical equipment, or education assistance), an upcoming fundraiser in June, and ways to buy a special edition of Ventura Life & Style magazine, where proceeds go to the families. To help with Russ Brazelton's shrine, drop off plants, seeds, and/or cold beer at the fence in La Conchita. For information on contributing to the La Conchita community, or how to contact representatives to expedite decision-making about the hill, visit laconchita.net/lcco.htm.