Mudslide: Remembering Love Creek, 1982

The recent deadly mudslide north of Seattle, Washington, is a tragic reminder - for Santa Cruz County residents - of the night of January 5, 1982. On that night, following two days of torrential winter rains, a large section of hillside above Love Creek, a tributary of the San Lorenzo River at Ben Lomond, gave way and crashed down into the canyon below. Thirty homes were destroyed and ten people killed by the slide; another twelve died in other parts of the county because of the storm. 

Residents of the Love Creek Road area haven’t forgotten about the lives lost that night. Examiner.com writer Barry Holtzclaw wrote four years ago about the restoration of the roadside “Toy Box” memorial.  I hope something will remain along that Washington creek to remind people there that living below a steep mountain slope is dangerous. It's been over thirty-two years now since Love Creek, and memories are too short.

I've written before about the "four horsemen" of Santa Cruz County history: fire, flood, earthquake and drought. It remains to be seen how bad the current drought becomes, but so far it doesn’t seem (to me) as bad as 1976-77. 

Mudslides can be seen as a kind of henchman of flood – usually found together; both bringing death and destruction to our human world. Here in Santa Cruz County, we’ve been pretty lucky in the past 30+ years. 1982 was the last major flood year. For Santa Cruz, it’s been even longer - 1955, when the San Lorenzo and Branciforte Creek combined to inundate much of the low-lying downtown and Ocean Street areas. No one loves the levees (or the concrete Branciforte Creek channel), but they have prevented a recurrence of that event.

This year will be the 25th anniversary of our last major earthquake in 1989. It’s interesting (in a macabre sort of way) to note that the single most deadly earthquake site in Santa Cruz is also the last remaining un-rebuilt parcel on Pacific Avenue. Two people were killed by a falling brick parapet wall at the original home of Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, which was located where the big hole remains between Bank of the West and Lulu Carpenter’s. It would be appropriate, when that site is finally redeveloped, to include some sort of earthquake memorial. 

We’ve had several major wildfires more recently than 1989, but thankfully without major loss of life. The nature of the fire danger has changed from the early days of Santa Cruz. Wooden buildings and open-flame heating and lighting were the main danger in the 1800s and early 1900s. Today’s building and appliance safety standards, along with improvements in fire-fighting, have made major structure fires a rare occurrence. Increased residential density in rural areas, however, has shifted the focus to the so-called “wildland urban interface” (with the awkward acronym of WUI). Since the deadly Berkeley Hills fire of 1991 (given the much more dramatic name of “Oakland firestorm” in Wikipedia), building and life-safety codes have been tightened to address “WUI” situations.

So, while the four horsemen have not been too hard on us in Santa Cruz recently, we can’t allow ourselves to forget about them. Wisdom in the present comes partly from remembering the lessons of the past.

Sources:

• Santa Cruz Sentinel “Thirty Years Later” article about the floods of 1982
• Mindwrecker blog - 1st person account of days following Love Creek
  
• Earthquake Collage (for those wanting to get a head start on the 25th Loma Prieta earthquake anniversary)