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La Conchita Residents Mark 10th Anniversary Of Deadly Landslide

LA CONCHITA (CBSLA.com) — As the rain fell Saturday on this small seaside village in northern Ventura County, family and friends painfully remembered what happened here 10 years ago, as dozens of homes were damaged in a landslide that killed 10 people and forever changed the lives of countless others — and the footprint of the community.

"The sound was horrible, it was like a big train just coming straight at me, windows breaking," Isabel Vasquez told CBS2's Jasmine Viel on Saturday."And like breaking pillars being splintered off, just so loud. It happened just so fast, one minute standing, the other crushed and buried."

Vasquez was standing next to the empty lot on Santa Barbara Avenue where she was buried alive by the landslide in a home with her friend, Vanessa Bryson.

"It was right here, and that hole right there is where they went through to get me out," said Vasquez, whose friend did not make it out. "I was with her just moments before it happened."

It's been a decade for Vasquez and many other family and friends who gathered under umbrellas to hear the bells toll for the seven adults and three children killed when more than 400 tons of mud came sliding down on the small village on Jan. 10,2005.

Just down the highway, at a bench filled with flowers and bearing the names of the Wallet family, Linda Vanderwyk came to sit quietly and look at the ocean in memory of her niece and her neice's three children.

"I would have, I would have without hesitating, exchanged my life for their's," Vanderwyk said.

For those still in La Conchita, why stay with so much loss, and the threat that future landslides here are inevitable?

"This is a tight-knit town, we've got good people here," said resident Lauren Thompson. "Some people don't understand that, or why we stay, but good people."

Mike Bell heads a community group in La Conchita that plans to stabilize bluff on its own, without Ventura County's help, but needs to raise $17 million to do so. First they need a geologist to come in and design a plan.

On Saturday afternoon, Vasquez said she didn't want to linger too long, but she left behind a pair of her friend's flip flops .

"I felt it was just time," she said. "I had them so long, it was just time to bring them back.

 

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