Name: What was lost — and rediscovered — amid an L.A. mudslide
Brand: washingtonpost.com
SKU: washingtonpost-com-1533
Availability: OnlineOnly
Rating: 68 (1 reviews)

critic

What was lost — and rediscovered — amid an L.A. mudslide

preview

STUDIO CITY, Calif. — Jessica Rouse charged up the pavement, sidestepping small boulders, her black rain boots splashing through muddy water that had turned her dad’s street into a disaster zone. She passed by some neighbors and two strangers, who had stopped to look at a pile of mud, broken chairs, grass, wooden pieces of garage, a sodden children’s book, tree roots and a painting wrapped in a blanket and cellophane.About 12 hours earlier, around 10 p.m. Sunday, her father, stepmom and younger brother barely escaped a mudslide that swept through their living room, sending them sprinting out the door, over a fence and onto their neighbor’s sloping driveway above. They weren’t able to grab anything, not even their turtle, who is the size of a dinner plate and who they tried to catch before the mud crashed through the home.Rouse knew the violent mudslide had swept away some of her family’s keepsakes and other possessions. But her neighbors were unaware of that when they stood next to the pile of debris.“I wonder what that is,” she heard one of them say. She paused, and then decided to tell them, “That’s my stuff; those are my family’s things.”The Rouse family live in Fryman Canyon, a forested neighborhood in Studio City mostly surrounded by hills and trails. After hours and hours of fast, heavy rain, that soil gave way. Los Angeles authorities quickly evacuated about a dozen homes, walking up and calmly knocking on doors because their trucks were too big to get up the winding streets, one resident said. Another recalled how, at 2 a.m., he had come home from the Grammy Awards show “to this,” gesturing at the piles of rocks and belongings in front of his gated driveway.Coming home to a mudslide is a surreal but very real snapshot of living in California. Many people live densely packed in dry, fire-prone canyons, where the charred soil can’t remain in place when torrential rains bear down, as they did this week. Shocked residents said they hadn’t seen anything like this since the El Niño-fueled floods and mudslides of 1997-1998, which killed 17 people.As Rouse rushed to see what was left of her dad’s house, she watched as reporters, neighbors and strangers gawked at the belongings and memories that once made up her family’s living room. It was difficult for her to express her feelings seeing their possessions strewn down the street, but she wanted people to know that what they were tramping over — taking photos of — mattered.And that’s when this reporter became a part of this story.About an hour earlier and about a mile down the hill, I had spotted a woman plucking a battered silver teapot out of the mud near her home. It was not hers, she told me. She saw it floating in the mud and knew it belonged to a family who lost a lot, so she went hunting for the rest of the set. Earlier that morning, she had also seen their refrigerator coursing down the street.“Maybe this is sentimental,” she said, holding a matching mud-caked chalice. Nearby, a scoop tractor was pushing debris into piles, crushing whatever was underneath. The woman didn’t want it to be taken away, for the family to lose more.Walking through her debris-filled street, I spotted two photographs, their corners jutting out of the mud. One was of an old ’90s Little League team, the other of a boy in his uniform, holding a mitt. A child’s baseball cleat was a few feet away. I put them in my car, because as someone who lost family photos, heirlooms and childhood mementos in the 2018 Woolsey Fire — and who has spent years taking disaster victims back to ash and rubble and watching them comb through piles for hours in search of anything tangible from their old lives that they could keep — I know what finding pieces of the “before” mean.An hour later, I was standing with two other residents surveying the wreckage, wondering what it was when Jessica Rouse walked by and told me, “That’s my stuff.” When I heard that, it clicked. Perhaps those photos and the silver were hers, too. A few minutes later, holding the Little League print, she pointed to a small girl smiling in the front row. “That’s me,” she said. That was her childhood memento. The boy with the glove was her brother. The silver set, a family heirloom.“I can’t believe you found these,” Rouse said a few times. “Thank you.”I had also found her father’s wallet, completely inundated with mud, all the cards and cash still in their place.The Rouses, along with other families whose homes slid off their foundations, were inundated with mud or water, or were crushed by trees, have difficult months and years ahead. Most insurance does not cover mudslide, mud and debris flow damage, and many people in California don’t have flood insurance. And you never get over loss like that. When asked about help, Jessica Rouse thought about the family turtle, who is still missing, and asked for people to be on the lookout.Despite all that, California got pretty lucky with these atmospheric rivers, which dumped more rain at once than most people can remember. Some homes slid, some flooded, some were crushed by trees. But for the most part, communities in Los Angeles and up the coast came out unscathed.Holding your breath and praying that you dodge disaster comes with the territory of living here, said Keki Mingus, who just moved to Fryman Canyon last year. Her family picked this neighborhood because it was out of a fire zone, she said, an imperative after they watched homes around them burn to the ground in the Woolsey Fire that swept through Malibu, where I also grew up. Listening to the winds shake the big oak trees behind their stilted wooden house on Sunday, Mingus and her family knew they would probably fall, that the house would most likely slide off. They again steeled themselves for loss as they listened to what they thought was thunder but later learned was the “whoosh of the hillside come down.”By Monday afternoon, that loss hadn’t come, at least not for them. Only one branch fell, and they let out a tentative sigh of relief that, somehow, they made it through another one. They had dodged another weather event that could have changed their lives in an instant — in which the photos in the debris could have been theirs.“But that’s California,” Mingus said. “It’s just part of it.”

STUDIO CITY, Calif. — Jessica Rouse charged up the pavement, sidestepping small boulders, her black rain boots splashing through muddy water that had turned her dad’s street into a disaster zone. She passed by some neighbors and two strangers, who had stopped to look at a pile of mud, broken chairs, grass, wooden pieces of garage, a sodden children’s book, tree roots and a painting wrapped in a blanket and cellophane.About 12 hours earlier, around 10 p.m. Sunday, her father, stepmom and younger brother barely escaped a mudslide that swept through their living room, sending them sprinting...

public

I cover climate change-fueled disasters for the  @washingtonpost . And I love to run stupid far.

What was lost — and rediscovered — amid an L.A. mudslide

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS