In a Scenic California Town, Worsening Landslides Force Power Shut-Offs

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 Los Angeles comes with a caveat. Underneath the multimillion-dollar homes is a large complex of landslides. Every day, the ground moves.

In the past, 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 four 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 on 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 Ms. 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.”

Ms. 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.

While news of a power shut-off at first moved her to tears, she is forging ahead.

“Today I woke up thinking, ‘They don’t know who they’re dealing with,’” she said on Sunday. That morning, she had been heartened watching trucks hauling in generators donated by a neighbor.

“It makes me remember why I’m here and why I love this community so much,” she added. “It’s not just the nature, it’s the people who are wonderful.”

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 last 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, the 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?” Mr. Cruikshank said, adding that the city had not yet been given outside financial help.

Although Rancho Palos Verdes, with local establishments including the luxury Terranea Resort and a Trump golf club, has a reputation for being affluent, it also counts among its residents people who arrived decades ago and watched their property values soar as lavish homes cropped up around them.

While outsiders question why locals stay, residents say it would be inconceivable to just walk away from their nest eggs.

For them, living on a landslide is no different than living in a region prone to tornadoes or hurricanes or flooding: It is not a problem until it is, and then you find ways to carry on.

Like many of his affected neighbors, Mike Agahee, 63, quickly purchased a generator to continue living in the home he built a decade ago. “We’re kind of in survival mode,” said Mr. Agahee, who works in digital printing sales.

The city has treaded carefully with this group of residents. Ara Mihranian, the city manager, said running a small community came with a different feeling of responsibility.

“We’re not going to abandon anybody,” he said. “I’ve worked for the city 26 years; I know these people.”

In addition to Rancho Palos Verdes, several other cities are on the peninsula. All have had their landslide issues. Just last year, townhouses in nearby Rolling Hills Estates slumped into a canyon.

Geologists are highly familiar with the area, and now a team is studying how to slow the land movement in Rancho Palos Verdes back to a rate that is hardly noticeable.

Mike Phipps, a geologist whose firm was hired to work with the city, said the plan for Portuguese Bend was to study the rocks and sediment being pulled from holes dug into the earth and figure out the most effective way to extract water. And prevent it from getting back in.

The good news is that recently the average rate of movement has been decelerating, thanks to a lack of rain over the last few months as well as water-extracting wells in nearby districts.

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,” Mr. 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.”

Vik Jolly contributed reporting.