In a scenic California town, worsening landslides force power shut-offs

By Corina Knoll

Perched atop a majestic cliff, Rancho Palos Verdes is a stunning city by the sea. Those who live here do so for the grand views of the ocean, the lush valleys, the breeze that sweeps away the heat of the sun.

But the scene on this peninsula 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles comes with a caveat. Underneath the multimillion-dollar homes is a large complex of landslides. Every day, the ground moves.

For a long time, that movement was so glacial — about an inch a year — it was accepted simply as a quirk of the region.

Now, for some residents, it has become catastrophic. Across a span of one square mile, the pace has quickened to nearly 4 feet a month.

Homes have been yanked apart at the seams, and some have collapsed altogether, their sunken roofs and splintered walls swallowed halfway into the earth. The gas was shut off more than a month ago to a swath of residents. They have since been hunkering down, relying on electric hot plates or propane, scrambling for answers before their life savings cave in around them, too.

Over the weekend, a distressing update arrived for a community there known as Portuguese Bend. The power was turned off to 140 homes, and the loss of electricity threatened sewer systems. Residents were told to be prepared to leave.

“That was pretty devastating,” a longtime resident, Sallie Reeves, 81, said about the news. She and her neighbors felt they were blindsided by the announcement after having been assured that they would retain electricity.

But a recent small fire in the region sparked by a fallen power line heightened the concern for local leaders who cited safety worries.

“There’s no playbook for an emergency like this one,” Janice Hahn, a member of the board of supervisors, the governing body of Los Angeles County, said Sunday. She called on Gov. Gavin Newsom to visit residents and see the damage firsthand.

“They are watching their homes, they are watching their streets crumble around them,” she said.

An executive for the utility Southern California Edison said the company was working to figure out engineering solutions that might allow power to be restored, while city administrators said they had reached out to hotels for possible housing help.

But residents outraged about the shut-off had already held an emergency meeting the previous night. Gathering on a street corner, they began to share resources and encouragement, as they usually do. A familiar feeling emerged: resolve.

“We just don’t have time to get upset now,” said Reeves, a retired school psychologist who bought her hillside home 42 years ago. “We have to move forward, and the longer we stay mad, the less that gets done.”

Reeves has spent months battling shifting walls and gaping holes in her three-bedroom house. At the same time, she has had to care for her husband who was disabled by a stroke.

But like most of her neighbors, she is not waiting around to be saved. She has reached out to contractors and made numerous calls in attempts to get a loan to reinforce her house with a steel foundation. She refuses to be ousted from the home where her two children were raised.

In so many regions of California, there are beacons of beauty primed for disaster. The state’s vicious cycle of drought and rain means that hillsides can become parched, creating tinder for fires, while downpours can prompt dangerous mudslides.

Over the past two years, deluges of rain have doused the Palos Verdes Peninsula, saturating a deep layer of clay below the ground. That clay, known as bentonite, has become slippery enough to speed up the once slow-moving landslides.

A portion of the main thoroughfare that ribbons around the city has since become a rippled hazard so disfigured by earth’s movement that there is concern it could be shut down. Shattered glass panes and fissures in the floor of the Wayfarers Chapel, a landmark designed by Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, led to its disassembly this year.

The city’s plan had been to drill into the ground and install water-extracting wells, known as hydraugers, that would slow down land movement. But a recent discovery presented a setback: An even deeper landslide that was thought to be dormant is in fact a major source of the trouble.

“There was a hopeful optimism that we could do something, but now that we’ve done more testing and found that this thing is not going to be solved by what we thought, I think some people are wondering, ‘What’s next?’” said John Cruikshank, mayor of Rancho Palos Verdes.

Leaders of the city, which has 42,000 residents, have made the land movement their highest priority, although possible solutions far outstretch their budget. Meanwhile, it’s unclear how many public resources should be given to struggling constituents, who represent a tiny percentage of the city’s population.

“It seems as if it’s OK we’re helping, but how long can we go?” Cruikshank said, adding that the city had not yet been given outside financial help.

And not all homes in the area have been greatly damaged.

“Some of them that are out in the middle are kind of riding along,” Phipps said. “The ones that are on the edges are the ones that are getting torn apart.”

By Sunday evening, homeowners were even more determined to stick around, having banded together to install generators that would keep the sewer lines running.

The notion that they might evacuate and with such short notice is ridiculous, said Tom Keefer, 67, who manages an apparel wholesale building and moved to the neighborhood three years ago.

“They can send all the warnings they want,” he said. “We’re not leaving.”