More Residents Facing Losing Homes in Slides

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 being 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 TV.”

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 officials 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 tests will now be taken around the exclusive Niguel Summit subdivision to determine the condition of the hills supporting nearly 1,500 houses, 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.