Mudslide Blocks in Pasadena Residents
By MIKEY HIRANO CULROSS
Rafu Sports Editor
Saturday, Jan. 20, 2007

Freezing temperatures may have led to a water main break, which soaked property of the owners of Frying Fish.

PASADENA.–Residents of a quiet hilltop neighborhood were unable to use the street leading to and from their homes Tuesday morning, after a mudslide blocked the road with three to four feet of soil and debris.

The slide occurred after 11 p.m. Monday in the 800 block of Holly Vista, in an area of western Pasadena not far from the Rose Bowl. A swimming pool in the backyard of a home below the private road was partially filled with mud.

Lisa Derderian of the Pasadena Fire Department said that about 150 tons of dirt, ivy and small trees broke loose after an irrigation main atop the hill ruptured, possibly a result of the pipe freezing. Temperatures in Pasadena dipped into the low- to mid-30s overnight.

City engineers were on hand to supervise the cleanup and to assess the integrity of the road and the hillside below a large, one-story home. Residents of the five or six houses up the street from the slide watched as a bulldozer cleared the road beginning around 9:30 Tuesday morning.

Yuko Akimoto and her husband, Sadahiko, own the 1.5-acre property from which the land broke off. It is their house above the slide area, where they have lived for more than 16 years. Mrs. Akimoto said that a neighbor phoned them at about 11:30 Monday night to report a water leak.

“My husband went down to check it and came back very upset. Our neighbor then called the fire department,” she said. “They said they’d come back early in the morning, maybe 6 o’clock, but my husband couldn’t sleep all night.”

Mrs. Akimoto said that she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary when she returned around 10:30 p.m., after closing up the Frying Fish restaurant, which she and her husband own and operate in Little Tokyo’s Japanese Village Plaza.

“It was very, very quiet, so we didn’t notice. Nobody heard anything,” she added.

The couple’s son has offered to drive in from Loma Linda to handle business at the restaurant while they tended to their situation at home.

Mrs. Akimoto also pointed out that the wrought-iron fence that surrounded their property–before it was mangled by the slide–was repaired and freshly painted just last week.

“That’s just the way it goes sometimes...shikata ga nai,” she said.

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