Tom Keefer can only describe the past few weeks in his Rancho Palos Verdes neighborhood as a nightmare.
Cut off from vital public services for more than a month while living in the active landslide whose boundaries have yet to be determined, Keefer and his wife have seen their lives upended by the growing emergency in ways they never could have anticipated.
Tom Keefer stands next to a generator outside his home in the Portuguese Bend area of Rancho Palos Verdes.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Beyond the closed roads, damaged homes, and transformed landscapes caused by the devastating, ongoing earth movement, they have found themselves struggling to safely store food and secure stable power while repeatedly running to the gas station for more ice and propane to keep their homes and lives afloat.
“We’re in a very difficult situation,” said Keefer, 67. “It’s not only emotionally stressful, but financially stressful as well.”
Amid the long list of challenges that now accompany daily life in their community of Portuguese Bend, the predominant feelings among many residents are growing anxiety and frustration, and even anger, at the lack of accountability, responses or assistance from anyone in charge.
“The sad thing is that there hasn’t been any help, it’s been extraordinary,” Keefer said. “There hasn’t been any funding… It’s only by helping each other that we’re making progress.”
The emergency has only worsened since the Keefers and their neighbors lost natural gas in late July. Other gas and power outages have spread across four neighborhoods in two cities on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and nearly 300 homes have been left without power and 224 without gas, indefinitely. Many have neither.
Utilities have said continued earth movement has made it unsafe to continue providing gas and electricity in certain areas, citing concerns about infrastructure failures, potential wildfires and other dangers that can arise with system failures.
In addition to losing utilities, residents of 146 homes in the Portuguese Bend neighborhood, including Keefer and his wife, lost their landline Internet connections when Cox Communications disconnected their service this month.
“It’s scary because it’s bigger than anyone could have imagined,” said Sallie Reeves, who has been trying to figure out how to safely stay on her Portuguese Bend property despite the lack of utilities — not to mention the massive fissure running through her 40-plus-year-old home. Before this winter, she and her husband had never seen landslide damage on their property.
Sallie Reeves, whose home in Rancho Palos Verdes is sliding, uses a generator to power her appliances.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Reeves, 81, wouldn't wish her situation on anyone, but she's hopeful that with more people affected than ever, she can bring more attention and action to help save her beautiful corner of Los Angeles County as it continues to slide into the ocean.
Yet months into the crisis, it is still unclear where that help would come from. Nor is it clear the full scope and capacity of this landslide complex, which authorities determined last month was deeper and likely larger than previously thought, perhaps explaining the unprecedented movement in areas where landslides had never been recorded before.
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Rancho Palos Verdes this month after power outages, but that provided no relief to homeowners or money to combat the underlying geological forces that continue to cause more damage. Nor does it extend to the town of Rolling Hills, where 50 homes lost power and dozens more lost gas last week due to shifting land in its hillside neighborhoods, which were not previously considered vulnerable to the recent landslide.
However, the state declaration should help cover costs the city of Rancho Palos Verdes incurs due to power outages, including generators and fuel used to keep the sewer system running.
The utilities have not offered any specific plans for restoring service. Instead, they have said more outages are possible, albeit as a last resort, and a SoCal Edison spokesman called it a “fluid situation.”
Sallie Reeves fills storage bins as she cleans up her badly damaged home.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Rancho Palos Verdes officials hope to slow the land movement with the help of five new drainage wells they are in the process of installing at the deepest level yet. The wells are intended to relieve groundwater pressure on the newly discovered deeper slide plane, or the surface that triggers the landslide.
City officials have acknowledged, however, that they do not know how effective the pilot project will be.
Meanwhile, Rolling Hills officials have been working hard to respond to the crisis, while also trying to distinguish the “markedly different” earthmoving from the experience in Rancho Palos Verdes. However, city officials reported this month that the earthmoving had damaged three homes and a door at the local Los Angeles County fire station and caused several water main cracks and breaks, and they are now facing utility shutoffs.
“Along with all of my neighbors, my family is struggling to deal with the serious consequences of the actions ordered by SoCalGas and [Edison] “This has taken a toll on us,” Rolling Hills Mayor Leah Mirsch said in a statement. “It is devastating on so many levels for all of us.”
Mirsch said the city had taken every possible step to prevent or delay these outages, but to no avail. He said the city is now committed to holding utilities accountable and “pushing them to implement solutions that will restore services quickly and safely.”
Sallie Reeves is using a generator to power her appliances. Nearly 300 homes are without power.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
All the unknowns have left many area residents living on the edge. For Steven Barker, it's been literal: His home in the Seaview neighborhood of Rancho Palos Verdes is on the edge of a growing sinkhole. He's lost gas service, but not electricity — yet.
“This has turned our world upside down, to say the least. We’re just trying to get through it,” said Barker, 52. “We’re trying to figure out what to do.”
He's worried about losing power (something he's been told could happen at any moment), but he's more worried about the effects the rain could have on the sinkhole that has caused ripples down his street and is pulling on the side of his house.
“We’re going to have a big problem if the water flows into that thing that’s there,” Barker said, shaking his head at the massive cracks that stretch across the street in front of his house. “Is it going to keep flowing? We don’t know.”
Barker has asked city and public works officials for months to address the sinkhole problem, but “no one is helping us,” he said. “The governor hasn't even looked at it.” [the landslide damage]. … It should be here, this is much bigger than RPV can handle. Much bigger than the utilities. … We need help from a higher level. [levels]“State, federal: we need the Army Corps of Engineers.”
Their fear of the approaching storms is shared by communities that have been battling shifting land for months. There is no dispute that the landslide activity is being driven by rising groundwater, which authorities have linked to consecutive years of heavy rains in Southern California. Many residents are also concerned that the situation has been exacerbated by poor drainage and repeated water main breaks.
The Seaview neighborhood of Rancho Palos Verdes has lost some public services.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
“Do you know how scared everyone is about the first rains?” said Keefer’s wife, Cindy, 63. “Nothing is being done to prevent a bigger catastrophe… We don’t want sympathy, we want work done there, now.”
She said they feel abandoned, having to find a way to stop the landslide and survive without the help of experts, engineers or officials. She has devoted much of her energy to a community-organized art auction aimed at raising money to respond to the growing emergency and save their beloved homes.
Jan Seal, who lives in a Rancho Palos Verdes neighborhood above the Portuguese Bend Reservation, said she and her husband have been closely following developments around the landslide and are glad they don't live on one of the many bluffs that overlook the slide area, although they are not too far away.
“When you hear about this happening in areas where there weren’t any problems before and they say this is happening faster than ever in the past… I think people always get nervous,” he said.
For Barker and her family, it has been weeks of taking cold showers, eating takeout and slow-cooker meals and grappling with the impossible calculation of what investments — installing a large propane tank, converting appliances to gas, switching to solar panels — are feasible or even possible for a home on the brink of disaster.
“If I lose my house … I don’t have the money to buy another one,” Barker said. “Are they just going to let neighborhoods go down the drain and people become homeless?”
