On April 12, 2006, a landslide turned to a mud flow and came down the hill at 3:00 am burying Walter Guthrie under tons of mud as he was trying to clear out a culvert under his home. The widow of Walter Guthrie, Lisa, and her neighbors, Douglas Wood and Periann Wilson are suing the City of Mill Valley positing that 1) the landslide started on City controlled property-the right of way for Hillside Avenue which was above the Guthrie property, and 2) the City of Mill Valley was negligent in that there was adequate notice of an active landslide and they did not take adequate measures to prevent the mudflow or to warn the residents.
To adequately understand the issue, one must look at the site model (see photo). The house that the Guthries lived in was built in 1963 and purchase by the Guthries in 1970. It is on a steep (37°) sloping site with a natural seasonal watercourse (ravine) running down the middle of it to a culvert that ran underneath the house and then into another water collection system. The house looks like a dam on the hillside ravine. There is a roadway that runs around the top of the property called Hillside Avenue. It was built before the City annexed the property in 1925. It was constructed by a method called side-casting which is where the cut from the hillside is then cast over the side to create the bed of the road. It was, and sometimes still is, a common method of road construction.
On the evening of April 11, 2006 Lisa Guthrie was returning from Portland where she was visiting her daughter and her new grandson. Her husband picked her up at the airporter bus. It had been raining all day that day. He told her that there had been rocks coming down the hill that evening and he suggested that she sleep in a different room that night since the noise of the rocks and boulders coming down and going through the culvert would keep her awake. She went to sleep in her daughter’s old bedroom. At 3:00 am she was awakened. She went into the master bedroom and saw that Walter had a light rigged up in the bedroom shining through the sliding glass door to help him see the culvert. He was standing up hill a little and wrestling with the boulder trying to keep it from going into the culvert. Rocks, ranging in size from a grapefruit to the size of a human head, had been coming down the slope every two minutes. Lisa called out to Walter to come inside, that it was dangerous. She then went and called 911 saying they needed help. The operator asked if they needed to be evacuated and she said no. She then went back to the bedroom to get dressed. She had her back to the door when she heard a “whoosh” sound. She turned around to see the glass of the door bowed from the mud against it, mud coming in the door and a tree branch in the bedroom quivering. She realized that her husband was buried under the mud (about 8 feet at that point) and tried to claw her way through it to him. Realizing she couldn’t, she ran out the door waiting for the emergency crews. She started to go back in and heard the house creaking, realized she was in danger and then left again. It took almost 36 hours to recover Walter’s body.
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