wfn.org | Relief Efforts in El Nino-Hammered California

[PCUSA.NEWS@pcusa.org]

25-March-1998 
98103 
 
    Relief Efforts in El Nino-Hammered California 
    Slowed by Lack of Urgency 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.-Church-based disaster experts throughout California say 
just about the same thing these days: Getting an interfaith group organized 
to respond to El Nino is just about impossible. 
 
    The reason why? Even though mud is glugging its way through houses that 
have slipped from hillside perches and pushing rocks heavy enough to stop 
traffic onto coastal highways, and even though local authorities are 
slapping yellow-and-red evacuation stickers on buildings, El Nino just 
doesn't seem like a disaster by California standards. 
 
    It's nothing like the fires that swept through Malibu in 1996 - or even 
like the earthquake that rocked Los Angeles in 1994.   Though more 
widespread, El Nino's overall impact has been much smaller scale - one or 
two cliffside homes destroyed up north in Trinidad, four in West Hills, 
another two in Studio City.  Malibu was much harder hit, but Californians 
admit (though no one wants to be quoted) that it's harder to muster up 
sympathy for houses built - as the biblical parable warns against - on 
sand. Sympathy comes even harder when those houses are built by the 
supposed ultrarich, who most assume can afford to build again. 
 
    Further, the rain is temporary.  As one pastor put it: "The weather is 
more short term around here.  You kind of forget about it a week later ... 
when the sky is bright blue and it's 70 or 80 degrees." 
 
    But for those who have to live in a house hit by El Nino's mud or 
rains, life is much more complicated - even in tony Malibu. 
 
    "This is a very strange, odd disaster.  It is so spread out," said 
Kimberly Schuler Hall, the southern California disaster coordinator for 
Church World Service, the relief arm of the National Council of Churches, 
one of the outlets for Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) assistance.  "A 
localized interfaith response is almost impossible.  Most people don't see 
eight damaged homes as a disaster. 
 
    "But it's a disaster if one of them is your home," said Hall, who 
points out that it is not possible to insure a home against mud slides - a 
reality that keeps suits between homeowners and insurance companies tied up 
in the courts for years after a season like this one. 
 
    There are places where El Nino's effects are obvious.  Families fled 
about 140 homes near Rio Nido in north-coastal California because of sludge 
and water.  More than 100 houses are still under water in nearby Clear 
Lake. In southern California's Laguna Beach, 13 homes slipped down the 
slopes of two canyons nearly a month ago, displacing about 40 - mostly 
lower income Hispanic renters - and killing two others. 
 
     In Laguna Beach and Clear Lake ecumenical response teams have been 
organized or are in the works. 
 
    But those seem to be the exceptions - which is why less than $3,000 in 
One Great Hour of Sharing monies have been funneled into California so far 
for El Nino recovery.   When the number of affected persons is relatively 
small, few bodies organize to do relief work.  As PC(USA) disaster relief 
consultant Les Sauer in the Sierra Mission Partnership says, "Communities 
that have not organized have not asked for the money. If they don't ask, it 
doesn't get sent." 
 
     More often than not, El Nino's impact is seen only as a crumbled home 
here, a gunked-up highway there, or a waterlogged beach house that can be 
scrubbed out in a week or more.  When it doesn't look like a disaster - at 
least, the kinds of disasters Californians have seen before - it is much 
harder to organize an interfaith response unless, of course, that disaster 
hits smack inside the boundaries of a particular parish. 
 
    But because of the sheer expanse of California's coastline, that 
doesn't always happen.  For instance, there isn't a Presbyterian church in 
Rio Nido or in neighboring Guerneville. "If local involvement isn't there," 
explained Stan Hankins of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) in 
Louisville, "it makes it extra difficult for us to respond from the 
Presbyterian Center." Hankins said one or two churches can take the lead 
for Presbyterian dollars to be sent into an area via a presbytery. 
 
    An interfaith coalition, however, is what PDA volunteers strive to put 
into place in harder hit areas.  Coalitions multiply resources and enable a 
network to remain in place for long-term disaster recovery. 
 
    "It is just the spread-outness of things.  People just don't feel 
immediately impacted if it's not next door," said Sauer, who works out of 
Sacramento and covers northern California.  "Because of the dispersal of 
events, the amount of destruction and the places, there's just not enough 
there to pull an interfaith together and organize around. 
 
    "These are small pockets of disaster," said Sauer. 
 
    Couple that with what some Californians call a weak history of 
ecumenical cooperation and little organizing gets done beyond immediate 
relief, such as finding daytime shelter for homeless people - since many 
shelters allow only overnight stays -- or helping to find temporary housing 
for displaced property owners. Committing to much more could easily 
overwhelm individual churches. 
 
    "This isn't like the '64 flood, where everybody was knee-deep in water 
and the only way into Arcata ... was by airlift," said the Rev. Phil Nesset 
of Trinidad, along the northern California coast. His parish includes one 
family with a front yard that now drops about 50 feet straight down to the 
ocean below, where the waves continue to pound the sandy bluff that is the 
foundation for their retirement home.  "People recognize there's a problem. 
It's just not their problem. ... 
 
    "We talk about community," he said, "but when things like this happen, 
it ain't necessarily here," adding that many offer condolences, but few 
offer to help families begin the hard work of rebuilding or relocating. 
 
    Church World Service's northern California consultant, Dick Eskes, said 
that the depth of the need is precisely part of the church's problem in 
responding to it. Even with maximum assistance consolidated ecumenically, 
churches are usually unable to come up with the kind of cash that 
homeowners need to start over - even after the Federal Emergency Management 
Agency and Small Business Administration loans are dispensed.  The "unmet 
needs gap" - what insurance and other loans won't cover - is so huge one 
disaster consultant sardonically calls it "the Grand Canyon." 
 
    "It is not likely that [some of these families] will be able to build 
back on their land," he said. "They lose the land [in a mud slide] and they 
lose the property on it too.  As a religious community, there's not a lot 
that we can do. ... The amount of cash they need is so huge - we just don't 
have that ... money." 
 
    But neither do many of the property owners. 
 
    Hall insists that even in Malibu there are plenty of senior citizens 
living on fixed incomes in homes they can't afford to rebuild. What's more, 
they're unwilling to borrow money and saddle their children's inheritance 
with debt even if they could contemplate paying new mortgages. 
 
    Then there are the maids and gardeners and cooks who often are housed 
by Malibu landowners when they are employed: When the house is gone or the 
owners are indefinitely tied up in a legal battle, so are the job and the 
lodging. 
 
    The complications of that scenario are familiar to the Rev. David 
Worth, pastor of the 335-member Malibu Presbyterian Church, which sits on a 
bluff some distance from the beach.  "In some of these areas that are 
sliding now," he told the Presbyterian News Service, "homes have been 
sitting on them for 40 years. [On other patches,] the land didn't move ... 
but build a house on it and down the hill it goes." 
 
    Despite what he calls Malibu's  "rich image," Worth said that one of 
his parishioners - who is trying to crane-lift his fractured modular home 
off a Malibu cliff - is a cop who sunk his life savings into that chunk of 
ground.  "The only thing that's of value in this town is land, much more 
than a house.  Once you lose the land, the house is useless. 
 
    "So our prayer," said Worth, "is that the earth quits moving." 
 
    No one knows what kinds of flooding will come when spring temperatures 
begin melting snowcaps high up in the peaks.  What's more,  geologists are 
saying that repeated torrential rains have already saturated California so 
thoroughly that layers of sand and silt may be slipping for months to come, 
whether there's more rain or not. 
 
    In areas that have been flooded before, that means not only dragging 
out the sandbags, but dredging up all kinds of worry, denial or passive 
resignation. 
 
    "There's lots of shoring up of levies in some of the more critical 
areas [such as near Sacramento and Yuba City] ... and that's forestalled 
the major flooding we saw in 1997," said Sauer. He figures that trying to 
fill some of the unmet needs will fall to churches, since agencies such as 
the Red Cross and FEMA left some of the less obvious disaster areas after 
immediate needs were met. He said that mainline churches, often located in 
middle-class neighborhoods, may not be as connected to the poorer 
communities that are more vulnerable in any catastrophe. 
 
    "We'll begin to see folks who've fallen through the cracks on down the 
line," he said. "More people will be affected if the rains come again and 
if the snow melts quickly and the levies go." 
 
    The Rev. Bob Cordier's parish around First Presbyterian Church in 
Marysville wasn't hit directly by massive springtime flooding but was, he 
says, "disaster central" in the relief effort and is still deeply involved 
in helping the community rebuild. 
 
    "But there are larger issues than putting walls up and roofs over 
people's heads," said Cordier, insisting that the church ought to be most 
involved in disasters that do not stay long in the public eye.  Other 
agencies leave after immediate needs are met. 
 
    "There are still lives to rebuild," he said, describing this year's 
spate of troubles as much more localized than the widespread flooding seen 
last year.  "Even though half the counties in the state have been declared 
state disaster areas ... there's a difference between a community disaster 
and a personal disaster." He said that the church feels responsibility to 
both. 
 
    Many Californians, self-admittedly, think of themselves as living in 
"paradise."  But last month the risk of living in a slide-prone area was 
all too real for reserve fire captain John Luna Jr., who spent hours 
searching for missing people as his three-person crew crept into Laguna 
Canyon just after the hillside slipped.  They pulled several people, 
including one woman whose infant had just been washed out of her arms, out 
of the thick debris. The infant was recovered by other rescue workers, but 
the search for another missing adult proved futile. 
 
    "I get up in the morning, come upstairs, and I have a wonderful view of 
the Pacific Ocean.  It's beautiful.  It's great," the deacon at Laguna 
Beach Presbyterian Church told the Presbyterian News Service, reflecting on 
the ambiguity.  "But I also live on a hill. [People out here] don't like to 
think of those things.  People don't want to admit [the] problems." 
 
    Others recognize the potential hazards, but dismiss them. 
 
    "It's just pretty quick, in and out," said one pastor of the repeated 
storms.  "If you build on a beach, you know you're at risk.  That's the 
price you pay, and most people know that.  There's a resilient attitude. 
 ... Nobody likes to have all their valuables washed away.  But that's the 
price of living in California.  You get earthquakes and massive 
rainstorms." 
 
    He paused.  "But 99.9 percent of the year, it's gorgeous out here." 

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