OAKLAND — Five months after several homes in the North Oakland hills were yellow-tagged because of a landslide, rain has returned and the work needed to help stabilize the slope hasn’t even started.
Residents on Alvarado Road near Claremont Canyon now are concerned that unless that work begins soon, they may have to evacuate their houses as they did last April.
And make no mistake, the slope will slide again once the rainy season hits full-stride, geotechnical engineers who studied the area have concluded.
“Everybody is saying this is potential for catastrophe,” said Tim Henry, whose house is directly below the slide, buffered only by the narrow Alvarado Road, which was closed for a few weeks in April after the mud started to flow.
As of Thursday afternoon, an agreement between two private property owners and the city to fund work needed to stabilize the slope for the winter — expected to take at least a month — had not been reached.
After dozens of worried hillside residents pleaded with them to protect their homes and children, the Oakland City Council unanimously voted late Tuesday to spend up to $300,000 in emergency funds to pay for the work because the coming rains pose an “imminent hazard.”
Council members did so even though Community and Economic Development Agency Director Claudia Cappio warned that any city work done on private property could expose Oakland to liability and set a bad precedent. The city in effect would be using public funds to benefit private owners, she said.
After the council voted, however, Michael Cochrane, an attorney representing one of the two property owners — Y&H Co. — said city money would not be needed. The owners would pay $200,000 to fund the work, he said, if the city would allow them to place their money in an escrow account since they couldn’t find a company to insure the risky work. The job could begin as soon as next week, Cochrane said.
James Potter, owner of 21 Drury Court, a multimillion-dollar home less than 2 years old, could not be reached for comment. His house, with sweeping views of San Francisco Bay, sits atop the hill above the slide.
Directly below is undeveloped hillside land, most of it owned by Y&H Co., which bought about 20 lots in the area known as Claremont Knolls in 1996.
Four lots are directly affected by the slide, Cochrane said.
Ed Baker, who lives in one of the yellow-tagged homes on Alvarado, said he had never experienced a landslide in his 20 years there. Many of the homes above Alvarado Road were built in recent years, after the 1991 East Bay hills firestorm destroyed houses uphill from Alvarado.
If a slide happens again, it could affect not only those homes, but also others in the area.
“Everything’s coming down to the 11th-hour here,” Henry said. “And here we are, at the bottom of the hill.”
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