Residents in Rancho Palos Verdes got that old, familiar sinking feeling on Saturday night, when a sizable chunk of a coastal bluff dropped about 50 to 60 feet, according to Los Angeles County Fire officials.
Nobody got hurt and no houses were damaged, according to the city‘s website, but “significant soil movement has resulted in damage to several backyards,” officials wrote.
The mini-landslide happened at about 8:20 p.m. along a coastal bluff off Marguerite Drive near Palos Verdes Drive West, according to the city. Approximately 300-400 feet of the bluff “sloughed off” toward the coast, officials said.
That’s more than enough to set nerves on edge in the exclusive coastal enclave, where hundreds of homes sit perched on hillsides with breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island, which sits about 25 miles offshore.
But those multimillion-dollar views come with a problem no amount of money can fix: The homes are built on some of the shiftiest and most unreliable soil in California.
Landslides have been occurring on the peninsula for thousands of years, the geological record shows. In the modern era, a large and seemingly continuous slide that began in the Portuguese Bend neighborhood in 1956 has destroyed hundreds of homes.
Slide activity has picked up noticeably since 2023, damaging roads, forcing officials to cut off utilities and “red tag” at least 20 houses, meaning nobody can occupy them until the threat is addressed.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
