The recent storms that have pummeled Southern California have quickened the land movement on Rancho Palos Verdes, leading to red-tagged homes and the historic Wayfarers Chapel shuttering — so the City Council has formally asked for help.
The council this week unanimously OK’d sending a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom requesting a state of emergency declaration to cut red tape, expediting efforts to solve the ongoing problem.
RPV’s land movement is getting worse and the rains — which have been torrential the last two winters — are “exacerbating the situation,” City Manager Ara Mihranian said at this week’s council meeting.
The city declared a local state of emergency in October, which provided “some tools to start to mobilize,” Mihranian said. But, he said, “we’re at a point where we realize that’s not enough.”
A state of emergency, city officials said, would help reduce the bureaucracy — such as lengthy permitting processes — that would slow various mitigation measures, including filling fissures, constructing drainage swales or installing dewatering wells.
“We’re not asking the governor to provide financial assistance,” Mihranian said. “What we are asking at this point is to use his emergency powers by suspending or waiving state permitting requirements.”
Doing so would allow the city to procure contractors to begin getting “boots on the ground, shoveling the ground” and putting in measures to stabilize the landslides, Mihranian said.
But Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said Newsom already declared a state of emergency for eight counties, including Los Angeles, on Feb. 4 because of the recent storms.
It’s unclear, however, whether that state emergency would actually do much to help RPV or any of the Palos Verdes Peninsula communities in landslide areas.
The Feb. 4 declaration from Newsom cites “dangerous and life-threatening flooding and debris flows, heavy snow, and damaging wind causing property damage and power outages” as potential consquences of the storms. But it does not specifically mention landslides — let alone historic landslide areas, such as those in RPV, that are becoming more vulnerable because of the torrential rainfall.
“It is not the city’s understanding that the Feb. 4 declaration gives the city the ability to waive and/or suspend state permitting requirements for critical landslide remediation efforts,” RPV spokesperson Megan Barnes said in a Wednesday email. “So that is why we are asking specifically for a separate declaration for the city for that purpose.”
Ferguson, for his part, said the state emergency team has already been on the ground in the area for several weeks. The state will work with locals as more specific aid is needed, he added.
“Our office will continue to work with L.A. County and with L.A. County’s office of emergency management,” Ferguson said, “to determine what state aid could be available to assist those in the impacted region.”
The RPV City Council, meanwhile, also OK’d asking the governor to request President Joe Biden issue a federal disaster declaration that could potentially clear the way for federal assistance.
“We know how bad it’s getting and how worse it’s getting every single day,” Councilmember Paul Seo said at the Tuesday, Feb 20, meeting. “I know people are extremely frustrated and they are borderline (expletive) off because their solutions aren’t coming fast enough. Trust me when I say that the City Council, as well as city staff, have been working diligently to come to solutions and also lobbying our federal, state and county partners.”
Representatives from Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi’s and county Supervisor Janice Hahn’s offices attended the council meeting and expressed their support for the city and its efforts to declare a state of emergency.
Residents, meanwhile, said that while they support sending the letter to Newsom, they are still upset by and exhausted from the process.
Nikki Noushkam, for example, said the land movement in her Seaview neighborhood is “getting worse every day.” Seaview already has two red-tagged homes.
“We are anxious,” Noushkam said. “We’re worried and we don’t know if our homes are going to be the next ones that are going to get red tagged.”
The City Council also wants a rush on the Portuguese Bend Landslide Remediation Project’s final environmental impact report The draft of the state-mandated analysis, which looks at the potential consequences related to the project, came out more than a year ago.
The final EIR is expected to be completed in May, instead of September as originally scheduled.
The Portuguese Bend Landslide Remediation Project consists of ways to potentially reduce land movement, said Public Works Director Ramzi Awwad, including fracture filling to prevent water infiltration; constructing drainage swales and a flow reduction to divert water to the ocean; and increasing hydrography at various locations to extract underground water.
The city received a $23.33 million grant from FEMA in August for the project, which is intended to help stabilize the 240-acre landslide area. City officials said in August, when they received approval, that the money would support the project, which comes with an estimated $33 million price tag.
City officials and residents are particularly concerned about the durability and safety of Palos Verdes Drive South, a main thoroughfare in RPV. It costs the city upward of $1 million a year to repair the road, which is prone to land movement.
There has not been any indication of “imminent unexpected failure,” Awwad said, but officials are working on “continuous repairs” that have been curtailed by the recent rains.
“We’ll be back on it in the next couple of days when conditions dry up,” Awwad said Tuesday night. “We’re also evaluating a number of other measures like speed limit reductions. We’ll be taking a look at the possibility of restricting trucks on PV Drive South as well.”
Either way, the city needs to move as “expeditiously” as possible, said Councilmember David Bradley.
“This is the most active landslide in North America,” Bradley said. “And there are certain things where you don’t want to be first and this is certainly one of them.”
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