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Less than 20 miles down the coast from where emergency workers in Montecito are searching for victims of last week’s mudslides is the tiny beach town of La Conchita, where grief and vigilance are permanently intertwined.
With about 330 inhabitants, La Conchita offers a scale model of the delights of living in California — and of the risks: the fires, rising sea levels, mudslides and earthquakes.
The beach is only steps away. Lemons and avocados grow willingly in the abundant sunshine. Yet residents live in fear of the loose soil above them. In 1995 part of the steep hillside behind the town collapsed, sending a river of mud into the streets and damaging a dozen houses. Engineers built a wall, sinking steel I-beams, the type you might use to build a skyscraper, deep into the ground. Ten years later, after heavy rainfall, the hillside gave way again. Mud surged down the slope and deflected off the wall meant to protect the town, according to Mike Bell, a board member of the La Conchita Community Organization, which serves as a de facto local government.
Ten people were killed in that January 2005 mudslide. Their bodies were recovered but parts of their homes are still buried under a giant mound of soil, a monument to the town’s suffering and lingering fears.
Continue reading the main story“Every day we think about what happened in 2005,” Mr. Bell said on Tuesday. “We know what Montecito is going through because we lived through exactly the same thing. It was a mud flow, it was rapid-moving, it buried people.”
A number of articles have been published recently about people pondering the wisdom of living in California, fire-prone and seismically volatile as it is, not to mention bank-account-emptying expensive.
When heavy rain comes, Mr. Bell plows mud flows off the streets with the town’s tractor the way Americans farther north do with snow.
I asked him if he had a message for the grieving residents of Montecito.
“Work together as a community, as a team,” he said.
But the words of a 2005 United States Geological Survey report on La Conchita are equally apt.
“This was not the first destructive landslide to damage this community,” the report said, “nor is it likely to be the last.”
California Online
(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)
• Attorney General Xavier Becerra on allowing offshore oil drilling in all but Florida: “In California, we’re weighing our options to fight this latest example of executive overreach and partisan decision making.” [Op-Ed/The New York Times]
• Federal immigration officials may be preparing a major sweep in San Francisco and other Northern California cities, sending a message that immigration policy will be enforced in the sanctuary state. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• The Republican tax cut will save California utility companies hundreds of millions of dollars. What to do with the money? Regulators are telling the utilities to pass on those savings to their customers. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• Geologists and officials in Santa Barbara say it is still too early to know precisely how and why last week’s mudslides became so lethal. But they are already studying satellite imagery to help determine the path of the deadly debris, in the hopes that understanding what happened will prevent similar calamities in the future. [The New York Times]
• Some insurers required people who lost their homes to the recent wildfires to compile a list of all their destroyed belongings, a tedious and often traumatic process. A bill in the State Legislature would automatically provide policy holders with 80 percent of their contents coverage if a state of emergency is declared. It’s one of a number of proposed insurance reforms related to disaster coverage. [The Press Democrat]
• The discovery of 13 emaciated siblings this week in Perris brings new scrutiny to home schooling in California, where almost anyone can open a private school by filing an affidavit with the state. [The New York Times]
• The cost of building the 119-mile span of the high-speed rail project in the Central Valley — one segment of the path between San Francisco and Los Angeles — has jumped to $10.6 billion, from about $6 billion originally. [Los Angeles Times]
• The flu outbreak has gotten so bad that several hospitals in California are treating patients in “surge tents” intended for major disasters. [Los Angeles Times]
• Blaze Bernstein, a pre-med student whose body was found in a shallow grave near a Lake Forest park last week, was stabbed more than 20 times, and the authorities are investigating whether the killing was motivated by hate. [Orange County Register]
• Bills have been introduced in California and New York this month to protect models from sexual harassment. At the same time Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and lots of other glossy magazines, is introducing a code of conduct. [The New York Times]
• The backyard shed gets an upgrade: Bay Area homeowners are taking advantage of changing laws and an intense demand for housing by building, and renting out, small dwellings known as granny flats or in-law units in their backyards, converted basements or garages. [Mercury News]
And Finally ...
On New Year’s Day, when California began legal sales of recreational marijuana, the cannabis map of America looked decidedly lopsided. The entire West Coast plus Nevada and Colorado had gone green. The East Coast? Only Massachusetts and possibly Maine are on track to allow recreational sales this year.
But there were signs on Tuesday that the scales might eventually even out a bit. Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, who was sworn in on Tuesday, repeated his promise to legalize cannabis. “A stronger and fairer New Jersey embraces comprehensive criminal justice reform comprehensively, and that includes a process to legalize marijuana,” he said.
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, outlined his budget priorities, saying he would fund a study of a “regulated marijuana program.”
Where does that leave us? According to one theory, the rest of the country lags California politically by around 15 years. So set your watch for 2033.
California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
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