Los Angeles Should Be Buried
The San Gabriel Mountains are waging war on Los Angeles and Ed Heinlein’s chainsaw is screaming in the late afternoon sun. It’s January 2015 and Heinlein, who has a friendly paunch and paws sheathed in mud-stained work gloves, is carving up avocado trees. They were drowned the previous year when a series of mud freight trains roared out of the hills above his house. “Welcome to mud central,” says Heinlein, “The assistant fire chief tells me it’s the most dangerous property in L.A.”
Heinlein is a retired elementary school teacher, current Christian minister, and has a preacher’s tendency to speak in terms of fire and brimstone. He lives in Azusa, a scenic nook in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, which rise 10,000 feet above the city of Los Angeles. Aware that the mountain range’s mud war is far from over, Heinlein has spent more than $100,000 to protect his property behind a trio of steel and concrete walls. Immediately surrounding his home is a final barrier, consisting of about 400 sandbags, 60 sheets of plywood and heavy plastic sheeting. It is a mighty fortification, so complete that Heinlein and his family cannot even exit their backdoor.
The mountains have been hammering Los Angeles for as long as Heinlein, 66, can remember. In 1969, tremendous rains caused a 20-foot wave of muddy debris to race down the mountains, burying homes and streets, and together with related flooding and landslides, killing more than 100 people in the foothills. Still, the developers keep building. As the evening sky goes purple then black and stars come out, Heinlein silences his chainsaw and points across the valley to a tract of twinkling multi-million-dollar homes. “When the big one comes, there’s nothing my walls can do, nothing anyone can do,” he says. “People in that new development are going to be trapped, and they’ll be flying them out in helicopters.”
Los Angeles was not built upon Hollywood or citrus groves or oil. It was built upon mud and sand and gravel.
A quarter of a century ago, master scribe John McPhee wrote about the San Gabriel Mountains’ profoundly destructive rivers of mud, articles titled “Los Angeles Against the Mountains.” These large watery pulses of mud and rock are triggered by rain and often fire and charge down steep stream and gully channels. Upon encountering flatter terrain, such as the graded lot of Heinlein’s house, they fan out to form thick muddy deposits. One of the most devastating debris flows occurred on New Year’s Day, 1934. Following a season of fires, rivers of debris poured down the mountains into the city, killing dozens of people. “Model A’s were so deeply buried that their square roofs stuck out of the mud like rafts,” McPhee wrote.
