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Evacuees gather at Red Cross center, while others try to clean up muck
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More from Other NewsDozens of residents who had been evacuated from the El Dorado mobile home park hunkered down for a second night on cots in a Red Cross evacuation center.
Neighbors on Ash Circle were helping each other dig out from a mudslide and waiting for their insurance adjusters to call. Backhoes were furiously removing sediment from Pole Creek to lower the threat of flooding on the east side. Curious residents were braving the rain to look at the Santa Clara River running between a levee and their back yards. Schools were closed, and residents were faced with finding alternative routes to Ventura and Los Angeles.
But residents were making the best of a difficult situation with another rainstorm due to come in early today.
"It's better than the other tragedies," said Dorothy Dalton, 84, in a reference to the tsunami tragedy.
"They don't have people to help them like we do," Virginia Bolan, 77, said as she played cards and chatted at the evacuation center.
About 100 evacuees and Red Cross staff would be eating dinner Monday night at the Veterans Memorial Building. They'd had hamburgers and submarine sandwiches but were promised "real" food Monday night, Bolan said.
Residents who were hit by a Sunday afternoon mudslide said they could count on their neighbors. The pastel-painted homes that back up against a towering hill all have front porches so people get to know each other, said 48-year-old Rick Giroux.
Mud stretched from the back of his house to the front after the face of the hill crashed through a sliding glass door, buckled the side of his house, left a wall hanging at a slant and filled the hallway. City officials red-tagged his home, saying it was unsafe to enter.
Giroux said he was watching Green Bay play Minnesota in the National Football League playoffs on television when the mud slammed down. "I heard like a bunch of rocks hitting the window, and then it just came through," he said.
He allowed the incident may not have hit him yet but said it was minor compared with living through the 1964 Alaska earthquake.
"It's lucky everybody's alive," he said.
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