Family Sees Dream Buried in Landslide

The emerald coastline and warm, windless weather of La Conchita beckoned George Caputo the first time he saw it. He was on a surfboard then. And the little patch of beachfront greenery struck him as a paradise.

That was 35 years ago. Long before he married Chris, long before they raised their three children, long before he finally built his dream home at the base of La Conchita’s steep, ridged hillside.

And long before the recent landslide that bulldozed George and Chris Caputo’s house--and buried their dreams.

From his earliest days in Oxnard, George Caputo had loved the beach.

By the 1970s, the young plumber was yearning to settle in a beachfront home, and his wife longed for somewhere safer than Oxnard to raise their children.

But beachfront property was too expensive on Oxnard’s fast-developing shore--$150,000 for just an empty lot in Silver Strand or Hollywood Beach.

“Then somebody said, ‘How about La Conchita?’ ” George recalled. “And that just set me off. And we started looking for property.”

*

For $28,000, the Caputos bought a gorgeous hillside lot and a half on Vista del Rincon, the highest east-west street that rolls gently across the feet of La Conchita’s brushy slopes. It was 1976 or 1977, the Caputos recall.

The village always seemed so warm, lush, perfect. Its ridge and coastline cupped the air, keeping wind out and trapping heat and moisture to create a micro-climate rich enough to raise bananas.

Chris Caputo’s brother, a San Francisco architect, set about designing them a little slice of heaven, gratis.

As they awaited the plans and saved for construction, George and Chris and the kids--Randy, Michael and Stephanie--drove up to their lot just about every weekend to camp and fantasize about their future.

Friends joined them, lounging on the beach by day and yakking around the fire in the balmy night, falling asleep beneath the stars.

Camp Caputo, they called it.

“I can remember my mom walking around the empty lot, deciding where everything was going to go,” Stephanie said. “ ‘OK, the kitchen window goes here, and this is the living room.’ ”

Finally, plans were laid: Groundbreaking in 1982 “was a happy day,” George recalls.

He recruited his buddies--fellow tradesmen who could lay the foundation, frame the walls, cover the roof, install the wiring--and they set to work on the seven-month task.

They poured a broad concrete patio out back for private sunbathing. They built a rock fireplace to warm the immense living room. And they set floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors at 45-degree angles to the street, giving every room an ocean view. George installed the plumbing himself.

Neighbors came by and introduced themselves--tentatively at first.

“It’s a strange town,” George said. “There’s dues to be paid once you move there.”

But eventually the Caputos, too, were looking askance at outsiders. Now they were insiders, members of this tight community of oil riggers, surf hounds, retirees and other kindred spirits who understood that the warmest hearths are built close to nature.

George explained the wariness: “You’re always afraid of losing what you’ve got.”

As the house took shape, Randy, Michael and Stephanie provided grunt labor. The boys dug ditches, carried rocks and shoveled gravel, while Stephanie swept up sawdust and hustled wood scraps to the trash.

“We resented it, of course,” said Randy, now 28 and a plumber like his dad. “None of us wanted to move.”

Stephanie hated the thought of leaving her friends behind in Oxnard to move to some little beach town where she knew no one.

“I locked myself in the car one day when we went up there,” said Stephanie, now 25 and working as a sales assistant at a Lompoc brokerage. “And I wouldn’t get out.”

But when the Caputos finally moved in, she began making friends right away and hit the beach every day. “And,” she recalled, “It was the best summer of my life.”

*

Snug in their seaside retreat, George and Chris Caputo luxuriated.

Traffic noise dulled to a hush on Pacific Coast Highway. The blare of urban life was overwhelmed by rolling surf and the cries of hawks.

Coyotes yipped in the night, and the cats--Honey and Flash--would hunt on the brushy slopes out back.

“Flash was always bringing home lizards and snakes,” Chris said, wrinkling her nose. “She loved lizards the most because she could cut the tail off and play with it for some time.”

One year, El Nino swept warm water up the coast. For two or three weeks, vast schools of dolphins gamboled between Rincon Point and the Ventura Pier, leaping and spouting close to shore.

“There were just hundreds of thousands of them,” Chris said, her eyes distant. “George and the kids were surfing. And they said they were coming down on a wave at one point, and there were dolphins right there in the wave with them.”

George Caputo recalled indulging several passions at once: “Watching the sunsets, barbecuing on the deck with shorts on and saying hi to everybody walking by. Working around the yard all day and then saying, ‘Ooops! Time to go to the beach.’ ”

Board under an arm and his dog, Jackson, tagging along, he would stride down the hill, through the tunnel beneath the Ventura Freeway, straight out to the water’s edge and plunge in.

It was permanent vacation. Work was just something you did so the vacation could last forever, George said.

Chris and George threw countless parties in “the fishbowl,” their huge glassed-in living room, where guests could gaze out at the Pacific or throw open the doors to nighttime breezes.

There were huge parties for Randy and Michael’s high school graduations, and two close friends were married on the deck.

Chris’ favorite memory was the bash they threw in 1992 when Stephanie graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

A hundred people showed up, friends and classmates and colleagues, to drink and munch on fruit salad, potato salad and cold cuts.

And Scotty McDonald, a La Conchita keyboardist, brought his band up to the Caputos’ to play surf rock and dance tunes into the night.

*

Over the years, though, the hillside began whispering to them.

At first, it teased, hinting at trouble they could not understand and, later, disaster they say they could never have imagined.

“None of the other houses had problems,” Chris remembered. “George and I were embarrassed. We thought we’d done something wrong.”

Walls, inside and out, started cracking.

A crack invaded one of the glass doors, just a finger-long fracture that lingered for weeks before exploding one day into a floor-to-ceiling fissure.

County inspectors suggested the house was settling because the soil underneath was not properly compacted. But that, Chris said, was one of the first things the Caputos did before building.

So they spent $60,000 on pressure grouting: They pumped cement into the ground beneath the foundation, hoping to level the house and relieve the stress.

It seemed to help. Freight trains rumbling past on the coastal line no longer shook the house. The cracking stopped.

The Caputos patched the broken plaster inside and the stucco outside, and things quieted down for a while.

A year later, the cracks all popped out again, and the bedroom windows hung crooked on their hinges. “They used to open, and now they were all cattywampus and they wouldn’t close,” Chris said.

“Pretty soon, the septic tank wouldn’t perk,” she said. They pumped it and pumped it, and cut back showers and dishwasher use to spare the system, she said. Nothing seemed to work.

“My husband’s been taking a shower outside for the past five or six years,” she said.

In 1992, the Caputos refinanced the house to help pay for the pressure grouting and for Stephanie’s college tuition.

By that time, though, things on the hillside had been getting uglier for some time.

In 1988, water began flowing out of the slope, creating a river of mud that rolled down streets at the east end of town. Mud undermined one mobile home that had to be condemned.

By 1989, soil was slumping here and there on the slope, which belonged to the La Conchita Ranch Corp.

La Conchita residents wondered if the water was coming from the ranch, which about 10 years earlier began irrigating thirsty citrus and avocado trees atop the cliff.

But ranch workers installed pipes to carry the water to drainage systems. And they hired geologists for several studies, all of which found that underground springs were feeding water through the hillside.

It was not until last September that the Caputos were told their neighborhood was in danger of being crushed by a huge landslide.

The very idea took a while to sink in. A landslide, Chris Caputo reasoned, would just flow down around their house’s foundation like mud that for years had flowed down the streets whenever it rained.

Even if it were bad, even if it happened at night, she figured, she would feel the house rumble and she would run out. The cats’ boxes were ready.

Maybe, she hoped, the county would somehow find a way to remove the threat.

George Caputo did not even believe the warnings.

“In my own mind, that mountain wasn’t going to come down,” said George. “I just could not imagine it. I kept looking out at the back yard. You had 200 yards going flat, then it rolled up for another 100 yards before the hillside started. . . . I kept looking at it, and said, ‘Nah.’ ”

But as time wore on, the warnings grew louder.

Senior Sheriff’s Deputy Darryl Dunn mapped the neighborhood, preparing for disaster. He came by to record George’s and Chris’ names, ages and physical descriptions and to draw a floor plan of their house.

*

Then came January’s devastating rains.

Chris Caputo began to worry. She packed up the family photos, important papers and some beloved Franciscan china in a Desert Rose pattern given to her by George’s mother, and she spirited them off to her parents’ home in Ojai.

“George kept saying, ‘That mountain’s not going to come down,’ ” she said. “I got dirty looks from him every time I went to move something else.”

She moved an antique hutch she always wanted to hang on to, and even shifted an extra bed over to Michael’s house in Ventura, just in case.

Dunn pestered and badgered George Caputo about the sweet, red-lacquered 1963 ragtop Porsche in his garage, threatening to roll it down the street himself unless George moved it. George finally relented, driving it off to a mechanic’s shop in Oxnard.

But while sheriff’s deputies asked for voluntary evacuation, the hillside remained stable. Eventually, George said, he let down his guard. Maybe it would not happen.

Last Saturday, the Caputos cruised up to Vons in Carpinteria to buy groceries.

On the way back into town, George saw a little dirt fall away from the hillside, to the right of a deep fissure there--not the left, where deputies had predicted the land would collapse.

“He said, ‘God, Chris, that’s hollowing out a big chunk, and if we stand here long enough we’re going to see a really big chunk come down,’ ” Chris recalled.

Just then, half a dozen avocado trees and a huge mound of dirt plunged from the cliff’s edge, tumbled down to within 50 or 60 feet of the house and plowed under two neighbors’ mobile homes next door.

George yelled to get the cats and get out. They bundled up Honey, but Flash lived up to her name and vanished before George could find her. George pulled his contractor’s truck out of the garage and put Honey in it, ready to go. Chris went back inside to get a set of pearls George gave her for Christmas two years ago.

By that time, Flash was found, and sheriff’s deputies and just about everyone in town had rushed up the hill to watch.

“I was sitting on the corner, talking to the sheriff for probably about an hour,” George said . “And all of a sudden, it was the strangest thing I ever saw, the ground behind the house just started moving forward. It was moving like a wave.”

Chris emerged from the house and joined the crowd sprinting downhill.

“We were running for our lives,” she said.

*

As the two-story-high wall of mud crushed his home, George remembered, he did not feel much.

“I said, ‘Oh well, there it goes,’ ” he said. “I was kind of down on myself for not having a different reaction.”

By the time the mud buried their fruit trees and rolled over the graves of Jackson and Rincon, their old cat, Chris had already said goodby.

“My feeling is we’ve had so much trouble with that house, I’ve already gone through my grief,” she said flatly last week, standing yards from where juvenile inmates in orange hard hats were sandbagging the street in front of her wrecked home. “Ten years of it.”

They spent Saturday at Michael’s house, too agitated to sleep.

On Sunday, they went back to La Conchita to comfort neighbors who had also been forced out, to help others move out while they still could. They were also reluctant to stay too long with Michael and his live-in girlfriend, Chris said, explaining, “He’s a single guy. . . . I don’t want to crimp his style.”

On Monday, they returned again to La Conchita, thinking they might get into the house and retrieve a few things. It slumped at a crazy angle in the side yard, crumpled by tons of mud still pressing on the back door.

George could see two things he wanted: Chris’ eyeglasses lay just 20 feet away on the tilted floor. A family portrait the kids gave them five years ago for their 25th wedding anniversary hung crookedly over the fireplace.

But as he went to step inside, rescue workers grabbed George, telling him not to risk his life. Chris snatched up a wooden sea gull that had stood on their porch rail for 10 years, and they stood back, stunned.

The mud took so much.

Disheartened, they walked downhill again, now remembering what they had lost: a cross-stitch tapestry Chris spent six months weaving; a bottle of wine from George’s best man to be drunk at their children’s first wedding; a file packed with jokes they had spent years collecting; the glossy new Dewey Weber surfboard the kids gave George for Christmas.

The CD collection was tantalizingly close--just inside the second-story doorway that slumped sickeningly toward the ground.

If only the house could be propped up long enough, Chris wished, if only the roof could be peeled back, they could scramble inside and pull some things out.

“I could think of 10 or 15 things I could just grab,” she said. “There is an oak table ready to roll out the door, and the ficus tree is right there.”

But insurance paid nothing for their loss.

Ventura County officials say the Caputos probably will be forbidden to build on their Vista del Rincon property ever again.

And worst of all, mud tore the Caputos from their neighbors in La Conchita.

On Tuesday, they returned again, to help friends pack and move.

But by Wednesday, Chris forced George to go back to work so he would not drive her crazy.

He returned to Bakersfield, where he lives in a trailer during the week while finishing a two-year plumbing job on a new school. “Today’s probably the hardest day I’ve had at work. I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “I feel like a cluster bomb that went off.”

Again, Chris drove to La Conchita.

“I wanted to try and urge people to heed the warnings,” she said. “Don’t leave anything. If you think something’s worth anything, grab it. Don’t wait.”

She returned again Thursday and Friday, to check her mail, to look into aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and to do whatever she could.

But she will never move back, Chris said.

“He loves La Conchita,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I hate it now. I loved our good times with our kids and our friends, but it isn’t worth it to us. It isn’t worth it to see this happen. I never want to go through anything like this again.”