Laws on Hillside Building Came Too Late for Some

OCEANSIDE —  Seven years ago this winter, the earth began to slip beneath Pat Petersen’s hillside home in the Skylark Terrace subdivision.

Before long, a 2-foot-wide fissure appeared in the home’s concrete base. Bathroom plumbing was ripped loose and kitchen cupboards were tugged from the walls. The house frame sagged, many doors wouldn’t close, and the floor sloped in different directions depending on where you were in the house.

Although they continued to make mortgage payments, Petersen and her husband, Carl, were eventually forced to abandon their home, which, along with 10 neighboring houses, was condemned as uninhabitable and demolished.

“It was a nightmare,” said Petersen, 67, who now lives in a mobile home on the flatlands. “I call it ‘the little house where hope died.’ ”

Memories linger, but spirits are considerably higher today among victims of the 1978 Skylark Terrace landslide, a disaster triggered by unusually heavy rains that damaged 37 homes--some of which sank as many as 20 feet.

Many homeowners have won court awards that have more than covered their property losses. Petersen’s San Francisco attorney, Patrick Catalano, said he has represented 37 people whose homes were damaged or lost due to slides in the Skylark Terrace area.

About 90% of those suits, filed against the homeowners’ insurance carriers, have been settled or have offers pending, he said. In many cases, Catalano said, his clients have won two or three times the policy limit because the companies were slow to respond to their claims.

“When I went to my insurance company with a claim, they told me (the landslide) was an act of God and they weren’t going to pay,” said Petersen, who paid $18,500 for her home in 1967. “Then Mr. Catalano came into the picture. Five weeks later I had a check for $132,500.”

Citing geologists’ studies of the Skylark area, Catalano has argued that the builder was negligent because the ground beneath the homes, constructed in 1959 on the site of an old landslide, was improperly compacted. Catalano said he targeted the insurance companies because a developer is liable for property damage only for 10 years after a project is built.

City officials, meanwhile, have maintained that they bear no legal responsibility for the property losses because the Skylark homes were built before grading laws were on the books. Since the slide, Oceanside has enacted a hillside construction ordinance requiring that soil studies and a geologist’s certification of the safety of slopes be completed before development begins.

“We’re pretty confident that we’ve closed any loopholes that might have existed previously,” City Atty. Charles Revlett said. “So far, we haven’t had any indication of problems with projects built under the ordinance. But we have had a lot of complaints from the development community that the laws are too strict.”

To stabilize the slide, city officials last year used local and state money to build a $590,000 neighborhood park on the site. The 3-acre park, where nine homes once sat, is at the toe of the slide and covers a compacted earth buttress designed to prevent future earth slippage. City engineers say the technique appears to be working, although some residents in the area disagree and fear future slides.

Now and then, Pat Petersen winds her way up to Skylark Terrace to stand atop the cracked concrete slab that is all that remains of her house. The “little tin mobile home” near the airport she bought with a $44,000 loan from the Small Business Administration isn’t bad, she says, but Petersen misses life “up on top of the world, near the clouds.”

Anxious to help others avert or cope with the disaster that struck her neighborhood, Petersen has joined with other Skylark landslide victims to form an outreach organization called “Friends and Neighbors.”

“Most people are naive when suddenly they see a crack in their house. They think, ‘Oh my God, I bought a lemon,’ ” Petersen said. “We were naive once, but not any more. So we want to share our experience with others.”