There's a whole new coastline in Rancho Palos Verdes.
The rapidly expanding and accelerating landslide complex on the southeastern tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula continues to wreak havoc on area homes, roads and utilities, even forcing the iconic Wayfarers Chapel to abandon its location, at least temporarily.
But it has also caused a new and unforeseen change at the water's edge: the seabed has been pushed up, literally creating a new beach.
“That beach is brand new,” said Denny Jaconi, pointing to the rocky shoreline that he said didn’t exist just a few months ago. “There are three or four of us who have been surfing here our whole lives and we’re just in awe because it’s amazing.”
The waters where Jaconi caught waves as a child — and even just a few months ago — have given way to a vast rocky shoreline, transformed as the force of landslides has pushed bentonite from beneath the sand.
“That beach is brand new,” said Denny Jaconi, pointing to the rocky shoreline that he said didn’t exist just a few months ago.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s changing almost every week,” he said, with new reefs appearing regularly. “In the last four months, two new surf spots have appeared.”
Jaconi, 45, is a lifelong resident of Portuguese Bend Beach Club, a small gated community just off Palos Verdes Drive South that has the most direct access to the developing beach. The neighborhood’s large white-sand beach has also recently bulged up a hillside; visitors coming from Seawall Road can no longer see the water until they climb up the sand, now mounded.
But the changes resulting from accelerated land movement don't end there, Jaconi said.
Nearly every home in the neighborhood has suffered significant damage: cracks in the walls, jammed doors, collapsed porches and shifting foundations, which are getting worse by the day. The main road has turned to gravel in many spots after too many pavement fractures. The tennis court next to the community beach was recently removed, its undulating floor no longer playable.
For most locals, it's the first time they've seen the damage caused by the landslide complex, which is made up of at least five separate slides, including Portuguese Bend, the largest and most active. Land movement has plagued this region since a portion of the old landslides were reactivated in the 1950s, but officials say the recent movement — the result of back-to-back wet winters — is unlike anything on record.
“Unfortunately, things are moving faster than ever before in history,” Mike Phipps, the city’s geologist, said at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting. In his latest report, he noted that the landslide continues to affect new areas, moving in some places as much as 13 inches per week. For decades, most areas saw movement closer to a few inches per year, if that.
This new and rapid movement has transformed the coast.
“The Portuguese Beach Club area continues to experience significant deformation along Seawall Road and bulging/uplift on the order of 4 to 5 feet along the beach,” Phipps wrote in his latest report. “This deformation appears to continue offshore… based on significant land emergence in the surf zone and nearshore zone at the southeast end of the beach. [Portuguese Bend landslide].”
The new shoreline is about 250 feet farther from the sea after parts of the seafloor moved about 10 feet vertically, he said, a “manifestation of this larger, deeper and longer movement of the Portuguese Bend landslide.”
Although this result is new for the area, geologist El Hachemi Bouali described the movement as “actually quite normal for a landslide.”
“Generally, a landslide complex will lose material at the top and gain it at the bottom,” said Bouali, an adjunct professor of geosciences at Nevada State University who has long studied the Portuguese Bend landslide complex. “If enough material accumulates at the bottom and is not removed by erosion, bulging or uplift can occur as materials accumulate and create upward deformation.”
Jaconi said it had been incredible to see these geological forces unfold in real time, in an area he thought he knew so well.
“Showing our kids this new coastline… it’s a completely different place,” he said.
But coastal changes have also been a bright spot for Jaconi amid the growing disaster that has ruptured countless water and gas lines, red-flagged at least two homes in the area and forced his family to undertake dramatic repairs to try to save and make safe their home.
The ongoing landslide in the Portuguese Bend neighborhood of Palos Verdes has caused significant damage to some homes.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
He said the new beach has made the water clearer, now that waves hit rock instead of a dusty hillside, creating better habitat for marine life and new places to swim.
“This is like our consolation in the midst of all this mess,” Jaconi said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we have a private beach there and a couple of new surf spots.’”
He doesn't know if authorities will ever find a way to stop the devastating landslide, but he remains hopeful for a future for his family here, with dreams of raising his five-month-old son on the same (well, different) coast he grew up on.
“We have new tide pools for the kids,” he said. “There are new kelp beds, there was a huge population of pelicans that just left… We now have about 50 feet of shoreline between the ocean and the landslide.”
