City leaders in Rancho Palos Verdes may soon ask the state to waive environmental reviews and other regulatory hurdles so they can start girding the city sooner against the landslide complex that threatens it.
Amid drenching rainstorms that threaten to worsen the problem, the City Council is scheduled to meet Tuesday to consider asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency for the area. The landslide complex that underlies much of the coastal city has been slowly shifting for decades, but over the last few months the movement has increased alarmingly.
Since 2016, the city has been developing a roughly $33-million landslide remediation project to stabilize the Portuguese Bend area for the long term. Officials had expected to present the final engineering documents for the project to the council in September, with work to begin sometime after that.
But the issue has recently become more urgent. Record-setting rainstorms that have drenched Southern California have also caused water to infiltrate the layers of clay in the ground in the landslide area, softening it and allowing for more rapid movement.
Two homes have been red tagged. Other residents have reported cracks in their walls, doorways that have split at the seams and sinkholes on their properties. The pavement on Palos Verdes Drive South, a major roadway through the community, is buckling. Wayfarers Chapel, L.A.’s famed “glass church,” was forced to close this month because of the land movement.
Streets are closed as new land movement exacerbated by recent storms has caused additional damage in Rancho Palos Verdes.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
“In some areas, [the land] is moving up to 10 feet a year,” said City Manager Ara Mihranian. “That’s significant movement, and we’re seeing the damage that’s being sustained throughout the community. We have approximately 400 homes that are threatened by this landslide.”
If the council seeks an emergency declaration and Newsom issues one, it would help the city move more quickly to stabilize the Portuguese Bend landslide area by allowing it to bypass much of the state permitting gantlet that such projects typically face, including reviews by the California Coastal Commission, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, the State Water Resources Control Board and the South Coast Air Quality Management District. The council may also ask that the governor waive requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act related to the remediation effort.
“When you look at the timeline and the path forward for us getting work done, I think requesting the suspension of entitlements will help us get to the finish line sooner,” Mihranian said.
If the governor approves a request, Mihranian estimates work could begin as early as the spring, as opposed to sometime next year.
City officials’ most urgent goal is to prevent rainwater from seeping into the ground. According to a city staff report, the city seeks to do so by filling fissures that have developed, constructing drainage swales that will divert runoff to the ocean and installing “dewatering wells” to extract groundwater.
Traffic barrels and cracked and sunken pavement on Dauntless Drive in Rancho Palos Verdes on Feb. 9.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn urged Newsom on Monday to visit Rancho Palos Verdes to see the effects of the land movement firsthand.
“I think if the governor came here and saw the buckling streets, the homes sinking and cracking apart, and the historic Wayfarers Chapel on the verge of collapsing, he would understand the urgency of this request,” Hahn said in a statement. “This is a crisis that is getting worse by the day, and I urge Gov. Newsom to visit us and see it with his own eyes.”
The ground in Portuguese Bend has been shifting extremely slowly for decades, making it one of the most studied landslides in the nation. But the movement has intensified in the last several months.
Major land movement is occurring across nearly 700 acres, or a little more than 1 square mile. GPS monitoring conducted in January showed that the average rate of movement within the complex between October 2023 and January accelerated three to four times compared to movement a year earlier, according to a staff report.
“What’s happening is unprecedented,” Mike Phipps, Rancho Palos Verdes’ contracted geologist, told The Times this month after reviewing more than 16 years of data. “We haven’t seen this kind of movement in the upper areas of the landslide in the whole history of monitoring this landslide.”
The city is not yet asking the governor to help pay for the project, mostly because of the delay such a request would cause. City staff wrote in a report that “time is of the essence for the emergency work to stabilize the area due to the immediate threat to public safety.”
Times staff writer Grace Toohey contributed to this report
