24H Mold Inspection of Tujunga

William Smythe founded the Little Landers colony here in 1913, one-acre plots along Commerce Avenue meant to be worked as small farms, and the flood that came down the wash the next winter ended the experiment. What survives from those years are stone and early frame houses on shallow footings set straight onto coarse alluvium, with crawl spaces inches above ground that stays damp for weeks after a storm. The lots still drain by surface flow, and a century of regrading, added rooms, and enclosed porches has left few of them shedding water the way they were built to. Downtown around Bolton Hall carries the same vintage in storefronts remodeled repeatedly since annexation in 1932.

The streets climbing toward Mount Lukens — Sevenhills, Crystal View, and the blocks above Hillhaven — sit on cut-and-fill pads carved out of decomposed granite in the 1960s and 1970s. Every one of them depends on hardware: terrace drains, area drains, subdrains behind retaining walls, and downspouts piped out to daylight. Decomposed granite and chaparral leaf litter silt those lines up quietly, and the first heavy storm after a line plugs puts water behind a retaining wall or under a fill pad instead of sending it down the hill. Cantilevered decks and post-and-beam floors over open slope add a second path, since a failed deck coating drains straight into the framing under the living space.

Haines Canyon drops out of the forest directly above Tujunga into a debris basin, and its channel carries that flow down through the neighborhood toward the wash. Since the 2009 Station Fire and the 2017 Creek Fire stripped slopes across this watershed, the ground above sheds water and sediment far faster than vegetated hillside does, and one short, intense cell can fill a basin and push muddy water into the streets below within the hour. Houses flanking the channel and the low yards near it take that water at foundation level, where it soaks into crawlspaces, garage slabs, and the base of walls and sits there for weeks afterward.

Up Big Tujunga Canyon Road, the cabins and houses along Stonyvale Road and around Vogel Flats sit beside a live creek in a narrow, shaded canyon below Big Tujunga Dam. Many started as weekend cabins on piers, have been rebuilt or added onto after successive fires and floods, and were never tied into a city sewer. Direct sun reaches the canyon floor for only a few hours in winter, so a structure that gets wet in January may not dry out until spring, and creek-level humidity keeps crawlspaces and subfloors damp year-round. Post-and-pier framing close to saturated ground, with skirting that blocks what little airflow there was, is where the rot concentrates.

Foothill Boulevard carried Route 66 through Tujunga, and the strip retail lining it — markets, restaurants, salons, small offices — went up between the 1940s and the 1960s with shared party walls and low-slope roofs drained by a handful of interior drains and scuppers. Plug one of those drains and water spreads sideways above a ceiling grid instead of dripping in one obvious place, while decades of tenant improvements bury older damage behind new drywall. The boulevard also sits at the bottom of the slope, so runoff off the streets above crosses it and stands against back walls and loading doors. The Plainview blocks behind add post-war slab houses extended on every side.