A Year Later, Damage Wrought by Landslide Remains : Disaster: San Clemente victims whose homes were destroyed see little progress despite a rebuilding agreement.

SAN CLEMENTE —  Tuesday was an anniversary Peter Shikli and his neighbors would rather forget.

One year ago, their San Clemente bluff top collapsed with a frightening crack, toppling three homes to Pacific Coast Highway 75 feet below and destroying three other residences.

From the look of the ruins today, little has changed since the night of the big landslide. The damaged homes remain in pieces and 40,000 tons of rubble, now surrounded by a rusting chain-link fence, still block the highway.

After a year of wrangling, the cities of Dana Point and San Clemente finally have agreed to help the California Department of Transportation repair the broken hillside, but for Shikli and the others, life will never be the same.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what kind of changes a person goes through when they find their belongings on the street and their half-million-dollar homes destroyed. . . . It did a lot of life wrecking is what it did,” Shikli said.

But, added Shikli, 43, a computer programmer who had lived with his wife, Edith, in the 2800 block of La Ventana for eight years: “Are we at a point where it has defeated us? I don’t think it has. We are on a major adventure here.”

Although no one then understood how bad it would turn out, there had been warnings of trouble along the La Ventana bluffs, the homeowners recall. As far back as 1992, a small chunk of the hillside owned by Lois Schwartz and Michael Makajesian collapsed.

Then on Jan. 17, a month before the slide, another piece of Makajesian’s back yard fell down to the highway. By late last February, gaping cracks began to snake through several homes on La Ventana, foreshadowing what was to come on the night of Feb. 22, said Jim Holloway, San Clemente’s director of community development.

Like the others, Shikli remembers exactly what he was doing about 11 p.m., an hour that seems frozen in time. He and his wife were across the street at the home of John and Diane Cox, where they had spent several hours socializing.

“It was like a loud explosion, kind of a rumbling,” Shikli said. “We started creeping across the street and felt a lot of wind in our faces from where our house used to be. Bits of glass were breaking and there were a lot of flashes from power lines dropping toward the bottom of the hill.”

Next door to the Shikli house, Richard Vaughn had already decided to pack his things. After spending the day moving furniture to the rear of the house, an exhausted Vaughn, now 55, had just sat down to listen to opera.

“I was listening to some opera so my nerves would calm down a little bit,” said Vaughn, who lived on La Ventana for 10 years. “Then down it went.”

Although an agreement on a $3.1-million plan to rebuild the bluffs and clear the highway was reached earlier this month, city officials acknowledge it has been a bureaucratic nightmare, largely because of the number of jurisdictions involved.

The La Ventana homes were in San Clemente, but fell down into Dana Point, covering a state highway and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad tracks.

The federal government is involved because it is paying 80% of the repair bill. Officials hope work to shore up the bluff and reopen the highway will be completed in June, 1995.

Besides homeowners, some business owners along the highway are eager for the work to be done. Currently, traffic is detoured away from their stores and they have complained of economic hardship.

Still, some parties marvel that progress has been made.

“We had to get six homeowners to agree to the fine print, two cities, Caltrans and the” Federal Highway Administration, Holloway said.

Said Shikli of the negotiations: “It was a monument to cooperation.”

He said Tuesday it was “hard to say” how many of the other homeowners will rebuild on La Ventana.