The Rolling Hills Estates City Council has declared a local state of emergency in the wake of Saturday’s landslide that sent multiple hillside houses on a slow-motion downward slide, collapsing roofs and cracking walls along the way.
Officials still don’t know what caused the clear-day landslide, which forced the evacuation of a dozen homes, many now completely lost. At least 16 people have been displaced, and the land continued to shift for days, officials said.
Although this landslide came as a shock to residents, the Palos Verdes Peninsula is known to be prone to such movement.
Not far from Peartree Lane, where the homes slid along the hillside, a slow-moving slide continues to shift land in the Portuguese Bend area, triggered in 1956. In the late 1990s, another landslide collapsed a hilltop office park in Rolling Hills Estates.
