Rancho Palos Verdes landslide problem is ‘bigger than our city’ say leaders, residents

It was just before midnight one day in March and Sallie Reeves was asleep in her 1952 ranch home atop a Portuguese Bend Bluff overlooking the ocean.

It had rained the month before – in record-breaking buckets.

But Sallie and her husband, John, who is disabled from two hemorrhagic strokes, had experienced just minor cracking to their patio and driveway.

But as they slept, suddenly and without warning, their bedroom ceiling collapsed.

And a torrent of rain blasted them awake.

“It was like a hose was turned on me,” said Sallie, recalling the night her life changed the course of her 42-year love affair with her home and with her neighborhood.

Sallie Reeves, like hundreds of other RPV residents, is dealing with the slow-moving, but deeply devastating, 680-acre Portuguese Bend Landslide Complex. Since the century-old landslide was reactivated last year, moving up to 12-inches per week, residents and city officials alike have been caught in its creep. Dealing with the slide is a Sisyphean task – repetitive and depleting – for both residents and city leaders, from repairing ceilings to filling fissures for the former, and from shoring up emergency services and seeking state and federal funding for the latter.

Reeves is just one of multiple RPV residents whose experience underscores the damage the land movement has wrought.

That March night, Reeves immediately mobilized.

She hurried her husband out of bed, strapped on his brace and wrapped him in a towel because he was soaked.

The couple moved to a small room in the house and rode out the March storm in a twin bed.

With their bedroom ceiling gone, Sallie moved John to a different room down a long hallway.

The landslide wasn’t far behind.

A few months later, it opened a fissure under the house — erecting hills and carving valleys in the hallway.

John Reeves, who moves about with a heavy-duty walker, couldn’t make the trek.

So Sallie Reeves relocated him again, this time to the living room.

Today, the landslide has all but decimated the Reeves’ 2,600-square-foot home: Ceilings are gone above the primary bedroom and bathroom. Wall joists are slanted. Tiles and foundational concrete are cracked — so traversing many rooms in the home is impossible.

The Reeves are planning another move. This time, they’ll vacate the house entirely as Sallie Reeves makes plans for an engineering company to move it onto a steel foundation.

They’re trying to outsmart the slide, she said. But it’s not really working.

“It’s just not nice,” Sallie Reeves said. “We’re trying to make the best of it.”

And they’re not alone.

On their 4-acre property, a few miles downhill from the Reeves, Sheri and Mark Hastings are also relying on chutzpah and ingenuity.

The Hastings’ bout with the slide has mostly occurred outside their home.

Mark Hastings, for example, said he first came face-to-face with the landslide when a water pipe broke on their property. That was in December, he said. They thought at first a root had grown into a Cal Water pipe.

But the next week, the pipe broke again.

And that’s when he knew: “We were sliding.”

The Thursday after Christmas, Mark Hastings realized repairing the broken water pipes was futile. They’d only break again.

He then noticed a tiny, one-eighth inch crack in the concrete wall outside a $300,000 horse barn on the north end of their property.

“So, every day in January, I’d measure it to see the amount of movement,” the software engineer said.

He also graphed the data.

After any rainstorms, such as the February and March record-breakers that exacerbated the indoor problems with their neighbors, the movement was about three times as much, Mark Hastings said.

As the cracks widened, the Hastings would fill them.

But then, in late February, the barn began having serious structural problems.

“You could hear the movement,” Mark Hastings said.

The structure creaked and popped.

“We can’t put the animals in here,” he told his wife. “It’s too dangerous.”

Today, there is no barn.

In its place is a crater, at least 40-feet below where land once stood level with the street.

“It looks like a war zone,” Mark Hastings said.

But as devastating as the barn loss was, he added, it wasn’t that hard to live through — at least it wasn’t their home.

“But if that’s your house,” Mark Hastings said, “people in the neighborhood, they can’t sleep because they hear that noise at night and they just have to move out.”

Sheri Hastings, a horse trainer, has relocated most of her steeds to offsite barns, but keeps three in the paddock behind the house.

Two 275-gallon water tanks sit atop a hill behind the house with potable water for the horses.

And since they can no longer get Cal Water service into the house, the Hastings have rigged up a system.

They’ve connected a 150-foot hose from the Cal Water main above the crater. The hose snakes down the hill, up into a pepper tree and brings water into the back end of their home.

That’s the water they’ve been using since April for showers and for cooking, Mike Hastings. And, he said, they exclusively drink bottled water now; they don’t trust the water pipes that have been broken and repaired so many times.

And like her uphill neighbor, Sallie Reeves, Sheri Hastings spends her days trying to stay a step ahead of the landslide.

She carries a nearly 6-foot pole with which to make daily assessments of the fissures on their property.

She’s onto a new one that formed over the last two weeks on the south side.

Currently, the fissure is a small one, about 3 to 4 feet wide and no more than 8 inches deep.

“This is exactly how the giant fissure that eventually took the barn started,” she said.

And that’s the problem with the fissures, the Hastings said.

They need to be constantly filled. Without fill, any water that enters will easily make its way to the bentonite clay slip plane, activating the landslide all over again.

“They gotta stop the slide,” MIke Hastings said as he stood on Vanderlip Drive, just above his property, overlooking a mile-long deep gouge in the Earth. “You gotta fill this whole fissure in.”

Neighbors have been trying. Some come with bulldozers to fill the giant gap with dirt.

But just like their barn cracks, Mike Hastings said, you fill the fissures with dirt, the dirt falls down and you have to start over again.

It’s futile work preserving the Peninsula’s fertile land.

Just ask the local government.

Even though the landslide has directly impacted only a small percentage of its 42,000 residents, it’s nearly sucked city resources dry.

The landslide’s ability to destabilize the Earth to the point of leaning electrical poles and snapping wires could spell wildfire trouble throughout the Peninsula.

“The entire city is on hold trying to fix this problem,” Mayor John Cruikshank said at this week ‘s City Council meeting. Staffers are working around the clock on fixes, according to Public Works Director Ramzi Awwad.

Dealing with this landslide is a herculean task.

Just ask Janice Hahn, the Los Angeles County Supervisor whose Fourth District includes RPV.

“This is a bigger crisis than any city should have to handle on their own,” Hahn said via email. “People are in trouble and their homes are crumbling around them.”

And despite the city having to deal with the landslide for decades – its name, afterall, is the Ancient Portuguese Bend Landslide Complex – it’s movements are still elusive.

Just last week, the landslide revealed a bit more of itself to city geologists.

There’s another slip plane twice as deep as the one geologists had been studying, according to a report from Awwad.

This deep slip plane is pushing from 330 feet below the surface. It’s moving the other, smaller landslide areas.

As the city learns more about the landslide, the local government is pivoting almost daily: It has hired a public relations firm to handle media requests. It has earmarked millions to fix the ever-changing trajectory of Palos Verdes Drive South. It has hosted town hall meetings and information sessions to reassure and assist residents.

But residents are, understandably, on edge and looking for solutions. Some are pointing the finger at the city and exploring legal recourse, as 16 Seaview and Beach Club residents did this week when they filed a lawsuit for damages against RPV and other agencies.

LA County’s Office of Emergency Management, said its director, Kevin McGowen, via email, has been intimately involved with RPV’s landslide issues from the start.

“On-going and long-term technical assistance has been provided,” McGowan said, “with engineers and geologists to aim on real, day-to-day work that focuses on trying to keep residents in their own homes rather than being displaced with nowhere to go.”

LA County Fire is also working every day to ensure there’s access to all neighborhoods and LA Public Works is “continually monitoring the sewer infrastructure and making repairs as needed,” McGowan added.

Cruikshank has sought out creative solutions.

He’s reached out to Elon Musk with a letter pleading for a donation of alternate power sources. But, the mayor said, he hoped instead that Southern California Edison would research ways to provide power off-grid for landslide-impacted residents.

The mayor surmised that perhaps both the public and private sector didn’t think RPV – as a well-off community – really needed the help.

“I hear over and over again,” Cruikshank said. “‘You’re a rich community and why should we help you?’”

He invited residents to start calling representatives in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., to appeal for help.

RPV officials are also pleading for more help – both in staffing and monetarily – according to both Cruikshank and City Manager Ara Mihranian.

During the Tuesday, Aug. 20, council meeting, for example, both city leaders were critical of higher branches of government.

“We have not seen a single dollar from any branches (of government),” Mihranian said.

Councilmember Barbara Ferraro agreed.

“We need it,” she said of the funds. “Because we need to get going with the work.”

The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services did not immediately respond to  a request for comment about its assistance to date in the RPV landslide area.

But Hahn, besides directing county resources to help, said she has also pledged $5 million from her office’s budget to RPV for disaster relief.

Both Hahn and Cruikshank are urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to come tour the landslide areas in RPV so the state’s chief executive can understand the urgency.

“The State and Federal government need to step in,” Hahn said, “declare a state of emergency, and assist these residents and the city during this crisis.”

In the meantime, without financial assistance, residents like the Reeves and Hastings rely on their own purchasing power and private loans to fund their fight against the shifting layers of Earth. And RPV officials are trying to stay a step ahead of the land movement.

But the slide contiues. The fissures deepen. Pipes break. Foundations crack.

And as the crevasses creeps onward, residents are left to cope as best they can.