of Mount Soledad overlooking Interstate 5. In all, the city included 111 homes in the affected area.

 

Photo:  Soledad Mountain Road is collapsed and destroyed by a landslide on Mount Soledad in La Jolia

No one was injured.

A bruising battle looms over what caused the massive slide and whether the city could have done something to prevent it. Litigation seems likely.

Panic struck about 9 a.m.

Ross Clark, 45, said he and his wife, Joyce, were standing in front of their home at 5748 Desert View Drive when they heard “the weirdest cracking sounds.”

“Pine cones were falling off the trees all at once,” Clark said. “The dogs were howling. The birds were going crazy. The ground started moving under our feet. There was a city engineer. He started yelling, 'Run, run!'

“We saw a mountain coming down. It was rock, dirt, trees, road. It was 20 feet high. It was like a tidal wave. It crushed the house next to us. It crushed our wall that surrounds our pool.”

Joyce Clark added: “We ran back in the house, grabbed our dogs, grabbed our son and drove. I have zero clothes.”

Through the long day and night, fire crews, engineers and city leaders worked the scene, issuing evacuation notices to residents of 55 homes on three streets: Desert View Drive and its alley (24), Soledad Mountain Road (10) and Palomino Circle (21).

About 200 feet of pavement on Soledad Mountain Road buckled, and the hillside streets are closed indefinitely.

A special meeting of the San Diego City Council is set for this morning, when Mayor Jerry Sanders will ask for authorization to seek state and federal disaster-relief funds.

Sanders arrived from Washington, D.C., and toured the site late last night, as emergency lights illuminated Soledad Mountain Road for utility crews and engineers scrambling to make repairs.

Some houses looked as if they had been dropped onto their foundations, like Dorothy's home in “The Wizard of Oz.” A power pole was snapped like a pencil, and electric lines drooped into the edge of the hole in the middle of the street.

Earlier yesterday, firefighters helped 52 residents retrieve pets, medicine and other personal items from their homes in the danger zone. Although the Red Cross set up a temporary shelter, most evacuated residents found lodging on their own.

Gas leaks were not a major concern, but more than 400 neighborhood residents were without electricity through much of the day, with service restored to all but 25 by last night, said a spokeswoman for San Diego Gas & Electric Co.

Rob Hawk, the city's senior engineering geologist, said the “major slide event” was over, though the ground continued to move slightly.

City officials said they have long been aware of the instability of hillsides on Mount Soledad.

The subdivision along the east side of Soledad Mountain Road and Desert View Drive was initially graded for construction in the early 1960s, when the area's geology was poorly understood, Hawk said.

In December 1961, a landslide destroyed seven homes under construction; in 1990, new construction of a home caused a landslide on Desert View Drive; and a third slide in 1994, affecting the canyon below, was repaired by residents.

Crews had been testing the hillside since water and gas leaks beginning in July indicated stirrings in the earth. A water main beneath Soledad Mountain Road was replaced with an aboveground pipeline; speed limits were lowered to 25 mph to reduce vibration.

One worried homeowner hired his own geologist from American Geotechnical in Yorba Linda. The geologist warned Burke against spending another night there, and Greg Axten, who heads the company, said the home was clearly unsafe.

“What he found was a home which was literally, he felt, on the verge of a major-involvement landslide,” Axten said. “He found portions of his interior collapsed, including part of the fireplace.”

City engineers and geologists were so concerned that the hillside was about to go again that they hand-delivered warnings to four homes along Soledad Mountain Road on Tuesday night, telling residents to sleep elsewhere.

Then, as workers were drilling a shaft to see what was happening 100 feet below the surface, the hill gave way and “slid down like a book sliding off a tilting bookshelf,” as Hawk put it.

Homeowners whose houses were damaged or destroyed by yesterday's slide could be devastated financially, because insurance does not cover earth movement.

“Insurers do not want to cover the risk,” said Risa Salat-Kolm, senior staff counsel for the California Department of Insurance.

As city engineers, soils experts and public-safety officials worked the scene yesterday, everyone wondered the same thing: What exactly happened and why?

There was no shortage of speculation.

About 70 homeowners and neighbors took the opportunity last night to vent their frustration at a meeting called by City Attorney Michael Aguirre.

The neighbors' prevailing theory was that water coursing from leaks in buried pipes saturated the hillside to the point where it finally gave way.

Alton McCormick, who said his house was “red-tagged,” meaning he is barred from entering, said a fire hydrant in front of his house streamed like a garden hose.

“I watched it for four days,” McCormick said.

Hawk acknowledged that city workers failed to realize a faulty valve was to blame for the hydrant leak. But he does not believe it was a significant factor in the slide.

Twice over the weekend, city workers came out and told him they could not fix it because of “Water Department complications,” said McCormick, who had just moved into the house in June. “All they had to do was go down the street and turn it off, and they wouldn't do it. ”

Julie Tyor, who is in her 80s, said she was about to drive to her bridge game yesterday morning when she encountered a city worker telling her she already should have been evacuated.

Tyor said she was literally carried off her property because she could not navigate buckled Desert View Drive.

“This morning I was a millionaire, and now I'm sleeping in a strange bed,” said Tyor, who did not know the whereabouts of her calico cat, Katie.

Aguirre vowed to conduct an investigation into what caused the slide and whether the city is at fault.

“What you are describing to me makes me very mad,” he told the crowd. “We're not going to play any games; we're going to find out what happened.”

Sanders declined to address Aguirre's comments last night.

“Really, what today and tonight are about is public safety,” the mayor said as he inspected two houses destroyed on Soledad Mountain Road. “After that, we'll be looking to see what the causes of this were.”

Ironically, the ground gave way yesterday beneath contractors who were running drilling rigs and installing high-tech devices to measure the hillside's movement. They had to scramble to safety.

“It moved a humongous amount, in the order of tens of feet,” said Rupert Adams, supervising geologist for the Carlsbad firm Helenschmidt Geotechnical.

“Fortunately, we were able to pull out.”

Adams spoke by cell phone from a Desert View Drive alley below the slide, where he said at least one house had been partly buried under tons of dirt.

His firm was hired to measure what was expected to be the gradual shifting of the hillside and to figure out how to fix it. The luxury of time has now vanished.

Pat Abbott, a retired geological sciences professor at San Diego State University, said nature – not man – should be blamed for the slide.

Abbott said Mount Soledad was formed when mud sediment layers on the ocean floor were “squeezed up” by the Rose Canyon fault, leaving weak rock layers at an incline.

“It's a geologically bad site and should not have been built on to begin with,” he said.

Adriana King, 44, bought her newly built, $1.8 million house in February. It is about five doors from one of the houses destroyed on Soledad Mountain Road. She said she was aware of natural hazards in the area but did not consider them serious enough to cancel the deal.

“There was nothing that said this mountain is shifting,” said King, who is married and has three school-age children. “It definitely said we're in a seismic zone, but, hey, we know California is in a seismic zone.

“If the whole mountain goes, there goes my investment.”

At 9 a.m., a cop pounded on Ed Thomas' door. He had to get out – now!

Thomas grabbed his dog and guinea pig and fled to a Red Cross station at nearby Kate O. Sessions Memorial Park. “I think our property values have just declined substantially,” the electrician said.

Others were hopeful that their houses were OK, that the evacuation was just a necessary precaution.

Many went to the park to pick up their pets, many of which had been rescued by the San Diego County Department of Animal Services.

“Most are very scared,” field officer Robin Sellers said of the dogs she encountered.

“They know something is going on. They're hearing all kinds of noises they don't normally hear.”

Staff writers Debbi Farr Baker, Chet Barfield, Gerry Braun, David E. Graham, Greg Gross, Karen Kucher, Emmet Pierce, Terry Rodgers, Roger Showley, Jeanette Steele, Michael Stetz, Jennifer Vigil and Lori Weisberg and Library Manager Merrie Monteagudo contributed to this report.