La Conchita, Calif. – No one here believes the mountain has finished falling.
High above La Conchita, where 10 people were crushed to death in January by a landslide, what remains of the slope looms like a sleeping monster, poised to pounce.
In the nightmare that haunts the survivors, the mountainside cracks again and pummels the rest of the town into oblivion.
“It’s frozen in mid-explosion,” said Dan Alvis, who lost his brother, Tony, as well as the house they shared. “It looks like it’s ready to drop.”
Some survivors suffer from acute trauma. Some have turned to pills. Several dozen who could not abide the tension have left.
A few outsiders, meanwhile, see a rare California commodity: affordable real estate.
Homes once valued at $300,000 are on the market for about half that price. The town, unremarkable except for its location between the mountain and the ocean, has also attracted camera-toting tourists to its narrow streets.
Visitors pass a sign at the edge of town warning that they are entering a geologically hazardous area and that the mountain could suffer a “catastrophic failure” at any time.
The landslide – which dumped about 465,000 tons of earth and rock, leveled 15 of La Conchita’s 166 houses and severely damaged 16 more – has left members of this community grappling with physical, mental and financial dislocation.
Alvis, who moved to La Conchita in 1969 after serving in Vietnam, sleeps in his Dodge van now, ready to tear out of town if the mountain rumbles again. At night, he parks as close as he can to the Pacific Coast Highway.
“It’s far enough away from the mountain so that I feel I wouldn’t get buried,” he said.
The prognosis for La Conchita is not all grim. While some people have left for good and others would like to, a real-estate broker is buying up houses, mostly from older residents. One was sold recently for $165,000, about half of what it was worth before the landslide.
There was a “mass exodus” from rental properties after the landslide, said the town’s unofficial mayor, Mike Bell, but many have been reoccupied.
Most of the residents who were unscathed, including Bell’s wife, do not confess anxiety.
“That’s probably down in there, but I’m not going to admit it,” said Barbara Bell. “You do that, and it grabs you.”