Slip sliding away: the landslides of Palos Verdes
A guardrail hangs over the edge of a section of Paseo Del Mar in San Pedro that slid down the cliffside last November. Photo by David Rosenfeld On the Palos Verdes peninsula, engineers try to hold back the forces of nature as the ground shifts beneath their feet In the rainy early morning hours of Nov. 20, Palos Verdes residents received a menacing reminder that they live on a bed of geologic activity far beyond their control. A 600-foot section of Paseo Del Mar in San Pedro below the White Point Nature Preserve suddenly dropped down the cliffside. It was the most damaging landslide on the Peninsula since the 17th and 18th holes fell to the beach in 1999 from what’s now Trump National Golf Club. This month a consultant firm hired by the City of Los Angeles to analyze the causes of the slide cited an unknown source of groundwater as a main culprit. Excess water, together with a general slope of the land toward the sea, the makeup of the ground and coastal erosion, led to the failure, according to a report by the geotechnical and environmental consulting firm Shannon & Wilson Inc. Little has been done to repair the estimated $62 million in damage done by the landslide. “All…
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