Rancho Palos Verdes city leaders could soon ask the state to waive environmental reviews and other regulatory hurdles so they can sooner begin protecting the city against the complex of landslides that threatens it.
Amid severe storms 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 complex of landslides underlying much of the coastal city has been slowly changing for decades, but in recent months movement has increased alarmingly.
Since 2016, the city has been developing an approximately $33 million landslide remediation project to stabilize the Portuguese Bend area for the long term. Officials expected to present final engineering documents for the project to council in September, with work to begin some time later.
But lately the issue has become more urgent. The unprecedented storms that have drenched Southern California have also caused water to infiltrate the clay layers of soil in the landslide area, softening it and allowing for faster movement.
Two houses have been tagged red. Other residents have reported cracks in their walls, broken doors and sinkholes in their properties. The pavement on Palos Verdes Drive South, a major highway through the community, is buckling. Wayfarers Chapel, the famous “glass church” in Los Angeles, was forced to close this month due to earth movement.
Roads are closed as new earth movements exacerbated by recent storms have caused additional damage in Rancho Palos Verdes.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
“In some areas, [the land] it’s moving up to 10 feet a year,” said City Manager Ara Mihranian. “That is a significant movement and we are seeing the damage that is occurring 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 avoid much of the state permitting such projects typically face, including reviews by part of the California Coastal Commission. 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 request that the governor waive California Environmental Quality Act requirements related to the remediation effort.
“When we look at the timeline and the path forward to get the work done, I think requesting the suspension of rights 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, rather than sometime next year.
The most urgent goal for city officials is to prevent rainwater from seeping into the ground. According to a city staff report, the city seeks to do this by filling in fissures that have developed, constructing drainage channels that will divert runoff into the ocean, and installing “drain wells” to extract groundwater.
Barrels of traffic and cracked, sunken pavement on Dauntless Drive in Rancho Palos Verdes on February 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 firsthand the effects of the earthworks.
“I think if the governor came here and saw the streets buckling, the houses sinking and cracking, and the historic Wayfarers Chapel about to collapse, 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 Governor Newsom to visit us and see it with his own eyes.”
The terrain at Portuguese Bend has moved extremely slowly for decades, making it one of the most studied landslides in the country. But the movement has intensified in recent months.
Major earthworks are occurring on 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 the previous year, according to a staff report.
“What's happening is unprecedented,” Mike Phipps, a contract geologist at Rancho Palos Verdes, told the Times this month after reviewing more than 16 years of data. “We have not seen this type of movement in the upper areas of the landslide in the entire history of monitoring this landslide.”
The city has not yet asked the governor to help pay for the project, primarily because of the delay such a request would cause. City staff wrote in a report that “time is of the essence for emergency work to stabilize the area due to the immediate threat to public safety.”
Times staff writer Grace Toohey contributed to this report.
