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Molly on mediabistro Blog

Hey! I'm famous. Kinda sorta. Not really. But I did send some information to the mediabistro Fishbowl LA blog and it got printed, along with Jeff's photos . Here's the intro:

News-Suppress, Part 205
Newspress1
As promised, here is an update on the Drama-by-the-Sea: About 500 Santa Barbara News-Press staffers, former staffers and community leaders rallied outside the News-Press's historic office building on Tuesday to let billionaire owner Wendy McCaw know that they were, um, mad.

Read the rest here.

July 29, 2006 in News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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.

May 23, 2005 in La Conchita, News, SB Independent | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Reporter's Notebook: La Conchita

This piece was originally published in the Ventura County Reporter 1/13/05, and then mentioned here . I have since written several stories on the family, the area and the politics surrounding this issue.


This wasn’t supposed to be a first-person story.
I first heard about the La Conchita mudslides when my roommate called at 8:30 to say there was no point in getting on the freeway to go to work in Ventura. At that point, the mudslides were an anomaly, a freakish expression of Mother Nature that was inconvenient but in no way tragic.
I still felt this way at 2:30 when my boyfriend, a professional photographer, called from La Conchita. Some houses had been buried. The situation was getting more serious. I spoke to my editor, and soon I was off, too, to report on what was happening.
I still hadn’t even brushed my teeth when I found myself near Carpinteria, arguing with a Sheriff who was just doing his job but finally let us through. All the way, I thought about the people I know who live in La Conchita. Charlie. His sons and fourteen-year-old daughter. All the friends and family and significant others who called Charlie’s house “home” and Charlie their “dad.”

Remember021I MET CHARLIE WOMACK when I was six years old and going to kindergarten at Hollywood Beach School in Oxnard with his son Orion, but I don’t remember that. What I remember is meeting his daughter Cory, a former bartender at the Sans Souçi and now The Drink, and then Charlie again on my first trip to the Burning Man festival, where he was camping with the people who later became my closest friends.
Charlie, who at 51 was easily my parents’ age, quickly became a peer. He was always sweet, kind, generous and peaceful, a kind of hippy patriarch for a wide range of kids and adults. He opened his home, his heart and his wallet to anyone who needed it; and at the time of the slide, could’ve had anywhere from six to 15 non-blood-relatives living with him, including the most recent transplants: Jimmie Wallet, his wife and their three daughters.
I didn’t always understand Charlie—a carpenter with the willingness to give more than he had. I wasn’t always comfortable with his half-way-house lifestyle or his role as fun-DJ-party-guy in conjunction with his role as the father of a 14-year-old girl. But those were my issues, and my over-identification with his teenage daughter. I knew that if anything happened to Charlie’s house, there were going to be scores of people both emotionally devastated and also homeless. And if anything happened to anyone living in that house, an entire community of people was going to need support.
This was what I thought of when I arrived on the scene, trying to park behind other media vehicles and then forging my way through the first mudslide, which submerged cars three-fourths of the way to their roofs and knocked entire sections of concrete wall into the ocean. I wondered if Charlie’s house was OK, and what it would be like to interview him in this kind of situation. I didn’t even wonder what it would be like to interview his kids about their father’s condition—and eventual death.
As a reporter, I’ve always been squeamish about emergency situations. I’m never sure how to handle the situation—feeling a strong pull between my ambition and my editors who want the best story, and my compassion and humanity, the girl who wants to help and respect the victims.
As a kid, I always thought it was rude that reporters interviewed grieving, scared or injured people. I’ve never wanted to be one of those reporters.
But later in the evening, I began to understand the role of a reporter. As friends who knew I would be on the scene started calling my cell phone, wanting to know if Charlie and his family were OK, I realized Jeff and I were the eyes and ears for our friends. We could be somewhere they couldn’t be.
And that’s the larger role of the media, too. Though the reporters and photographers may not know someone involved in, or affected by, every disaster and event, the media’s purpose to be the eyes and ears for the people who care about what’s happening. For me, suddenly, it became not about “getting the story” (which I’ve never been good at anyway—which is why I left the Star and moved to the Reporter), but about telling my friends what’s happening; and explaining to people who aren’t my friends why they should care about this.

Remember401I FINALLY PARK MY CAR on the far side of the first slide and make my way into the small town. Most people who drive the stretch from Ventura to Santa Barbara know La Conchita in some way—either as the road sign which promises food they don’t need, or as the place they can fill up with regular and Corn Nuts when they realize they can’t make it to Santa Barbara without either one.
Now a nearly 30-foot-high pile of mud covers 15 to 20 houses over a four-block area where rain suddenly loosened part of the adjoining hillside, managed to level some houses, split others in two, move an entire bus from one side of the street to the other and buried anywhere from six to 12 people.
What was different about this slide from the one in 1995, said a spokesperson for the Ventura County Fire Department, is that the earlier mudslide was a slow, gradual release of the Earth. This one, however, was incredibly sudden and violent. All but a few houses were completely buried, invisible from the top of the debris pile.
Residents had little warning. Some reported hearing a rumbling, then saw the mountain come loose and move toward them. The people trapped inside the rubble may not have known what was happening before the debris locked them inside what may be their muddy graves, said emergency personnel.
The place is teeming with people, few of them civilians. Fire departments from several cities, sheriffs from several counties, EMT, reporters and cameramen are all there.
They won’t let me past the yellow tape, so I walk around. Tessa, Charlie’s fourteen-year-old daughter, stands behind one of the lines. As soon as I see her, she grabs onto me. She’s near tears. Her Daddy is in there.
I cease being a reporter. I put away my notepad, and avoid helping the other reporters on the scene whom I know from a former job, a former life. I find Annie, whose sister dates Charlie’s son Isaiah. She’s holding on to two of her dogs—a medium-sized and a small one—held together by one single rope. She tells me Charlie’s still in the house, buried beneath the mud. Her boyfriend Griffin, who was sleeping in a bus-made-living-space outside the house, survived with a broken leg. Her twin sister Brie lost all her pets. Brie’s boyfriend and Charlie’s other son, Orion, are up on the hill, trying to dig out their father.
Everywhere, there are fire trucks, emergency vehicles, people in matching uniforms. It seems the only civilians are people I know.
The sheriffs won’t let us through to find Brie (whom Annie wants to find so her mom can take them to Santa Barbara before the rain starts again), so we snake our way around the southern side of the tape, through someone else’s backyard. Annie finds Brie and they embrace. I climb onto the roof, where Tessa is sitting with other family members and neighbors. I can’t help but cry as I look out over the towering pile of mud and the rescue workers, like ants, who are dwarfed by the enormity of it. The platform Charlie built for the top of his bus, where his band would sometimes play, was turned on its side and pushed across the street. The top of a teepee Charlie built for himself in the yard, where he may have been sleeping, barely peeked out of the dirt about half a block away. Pieces of walls, sections of furniture, entire trees and more mud than you can imagine covered everything else—including people. Including Charlie.
I think about him again. For me, a twenty-something with a stable family, a history of trauma, a freakish streak and a serious issue with feeling like an outsider, Charlie was always the unconditionally loving father-slash-cool-friend-slash-self-esteem-boosting-guy. His hugs were always warm. His promises were always sincere and manifested. His connection with me—eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart—always felt special, unique and real. I know I could’ve called him at 4 a.m. on any night to help me out of an emergency, and he would’ve come. In fact, he rescued so many people—on large levels and small levels—that it’s hard to imagine what half my friends would’ve done without him. And even harder to imagine that now he was the one needing rescuing.

Remember03 IT BEGINS TO GET DARK. And cold. I’m starving. I can only imagine the last time the families of the victims, who wander aimlessly from backyard to backyard trying to do something have eaten. Or the victims themselves. When was the last time Charlie had a meal? I heard he was sick, and might’ve been in bed if he wasn’t on some kind of spiritual hike in the hills. What kind of sustenance had he ingested before the slide? Was he trapped in a muddy hole, suffocating and dreaming of French fries?
There is much waiting. Tessa, her brothers and a friend of the family, who ran on the train tracks from the roadblocks to reach the scene, say a prayer. “God, bring us back our families,” they say. Later, he tells me what Charlie means to him. “He was my dad, you know? Not my blood dad, but he was my dad.” They all take turns crying.
The men and women in matching yellow and orange rain gear are digging, chain sawing, and mostly standing around making people nervous. A body is found. Tessa is sure it’s her dad and she begins to wail.
“No no no no,” says the teenager, screaming as her aunt and another friend hold her. Photographers turn their attention from the pile of mud to Annie, Brie, Orion, Isaiah, Tess and others.
“Get that fucking thing away from me,” someone says to one photographer. There is a flurry of activity while someone tries to confirm whether the body is Charlie. It turns out it’s not, but that only comforts any of us to the degree that we still don’t know. It doesn’t mean Charlie’s alive.
Finally Annie, Brie, Tessa and Tessa’s aunt leave. It gets dark and cold. Isaiah and Orion won’t leave. Neither will Gator (Jimmie Wallet), who is at times calm, at times falling apart, thinking about his missing 2- 6- and 10-year-old daughters, as well as his wife. The three men had tried to help the rescuers, but were asked to leave the scene. All they can do now is stand in the street, on the roofs of houses, and watch and wait. At one point, Gator collapses onto the sidewalk, bowing into Child’s Pose with his arms over his head. Hours pass. Someone brings water and orange juice. We offer the boys our cigarettes, which they smoke gratefully. A body is removed on a stretcher—rescue workers confirm it’s a woman. It’s not Charlie.
There are fire trucks from all over, now: Montecito, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Long Beach, all shining football-stadium-strength lights over the scene. A block away, the public information officer holds a press conference. Up here, though, finally, the cameras and reporters are gone.
It’s now near 7 p.m. We hear the sheriff’s radios broadcasting that the hill is unstable and anyone who stays does so at extreme risk. They’re advising us all to leave La Conchita now, including the press.
Jeff and I decide we’re more of a hindrance than a help—we can’t dig, we’ve given away all our cigarettes and now we’re just dead weight. We are not Charlie’s closest kin; we are simply loving friends lucky enough to have jobs that allowed us to be on the scene. We navigate the complicated obstacle course of sheriffs, mud and debris to get out.

TWO HOURS LATER, the phone rings. They’ve found Charlie. Orion identified him. He’s dead. With a smile on his face. The ripples went through our community quickly. We are a close-knit group of friends, and any loss would have an impact. There was denial. Tears. Multiple phone calls. Decisions to meet up as soon as possible.
La Conchita is a small town of fewer than a hundred houses. And the mudslides, though terrible and destructive, only affected four blocks of the town. But within those four blocks, under a mound of impenetrable mud and dangerous debris, a friend of mine struggled for his life—or at the very least, spent the last moments of it trapped in a dark hole, alone.
No photo, no video clip, no quote from a bystander can tell you that.
Not even I, safely back in Santa Barbara, in contact with the family only by cell phone, can imagine what it’s like to be having breakfast one moment and seven hours later identify your father’s own body. And his smile.
But I know that I’m angry at the rain tonight. And at Charlie for continuing to live in that house after the 1995 mudslide.
And I’m sure soon I’ll be in denial again, with the help of my can of Coors Light, and then on to whatever stage of grief comes next.
And I’m also grateful for the fact that the sky, the streets, the lawns are miserable. Because so am I.


Charlie Womack’s friends have established a fund to help pay for funeral expenses. Contact Jessica Lunsford at 259-8885, or send checks to “Charlie Womack Memorial Fund,” Santa Barbara Bank and Trust, 250 S. Mills Rd., Ventura, CA 93003.

January 15, 2005 in Essays, News, VC Reporter | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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