The ground in this area has dropped around 5-6 feet in just a few months.
1/6
Portuguese Bend, an area in Rancho Palos Verdes, is currently shifting at a rate of 7 to 12 inches per week and threatening numerous neighborhoods.
My mom grew up here, her house fell down the hillside back in the 70s. There's also a really cool spot called Sunken City in San Pedro where an entire neighborhood fell down the cliffs and all the sidewalks and house foundations are still there.
One of the most interesting things about this city is their surfer gang, the Luanda Bay Boys
Edit: *Lunada
Although I guess they are technically from Palos Verdes Estates.
Gang is a pretty generous term for some entitled surfers. Yes they protect their turf violently and are assholes. Not sure I would call them anything other than locals or a surf club. Wouldn't want the world wide audience of Reddit to think these idiots are any more important than they are.
But they have gang right there in their title!
Only way to deal with a gang problem is a lock in at the rec center.
Also a stunningly beautiful extremely wealthy area.
yeah for a moment i was asking me self why the portuguese news had nothing about this
In the United States
Per WEEK, holy shit... Gonna need to keep an eye on that one.
Since April 2024, it's increased it's velocity by 41% from March-April. Holy shit is right! Source: https://rpvca.gov/1707/Have-questions-about-land-movement#news
At that rate it'll get to Mars before we do!
Ya see dose islands over here? Well I heard tell dey used to be up on dat mountain east a town, about hunnert years ago, back in da before time.
Take it easy there Bright eyes
Is this referencing Watership Down?
Man I'm old as s*** if that's what you're referencing
But you made the reference? Are you telling on yourself that you're old as shit? Lol
No evacuation warnings or orders have been issued at this time for the neighborhoods in and adjacent to the landslide complex.
That seems… unwise.
ACCELERATE!
New continent splitting?
Just a really unstable hillside that has been slowly falling down since 1956
You're not allowed to swim down there because of the houses that are already down there that they don't want to clean up.
on going landslide i looked it up lol im like is cali gonna sink but nah its just a slow moving thing that happening not an imminent earthquake
The real bummer is that it’s taking Wayfarer’s Chapel with it. I used to ride my motorcycle over from Long Beach and chill in the gardens. Just watch the ocean while the hummingbirds chase each other through the trees and flowers.
Have you seen they're completely dismantling it? There's plans to reassemble it somewhere else though I'm not sure where. I don't even know how to go about taking down a structure like that and maintain what originally made it special. I hope it finds a way though.
They're trying to raise funds for it, last I checked the gofundme didn't have much
Edit: up to 77k out of 250 so far
Oh shit, i was wondering why the name was familiar. That's really unfortunate.
Or just wait a few decades for it to show up near your city.
You can really see from this angle how the whole neighborhood was build on land that was already sliding in the past at some point.
It's socal so "already sliding" should just be assumed. And that hill in particular has always been at risk.
"So why do they call this place Rolling Hills?"
Yeah, it’s been a known issue for decades at least. I went out there on a field trip with a local school when we were discussing fault lines. Even then the roads were already patched up everywhere from mini slides and the writing was on the wall (ground) that there would be failure in the near future (like within the next 100 years).
I graduated from Pedro High in 1982. It was an issue then. There used to be the frame from a Lotus Europa that someone had driven off the cliff. The road was always screwed up.
And let’s look a little further north in Malibu. More examples of how people want that coastal property, right on the ocean cliffs, without considering the consequences. FAFO with nature.
Yup, some of these houses were fine in the beginning of the year.
It’s been moving for the past 40yrs, just more rapidly now
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/29/richest-retirement-towns-us-gobankingrates.html
It's the richest retirement town in the country with many luxury homes.
No, you're talking about Ranchos Palos Verdes Estates which is not Ranchos Palos Verdes. People conflate the two all the time. Most of Ranchos Palos Verdes is normal single family homes.
It looks really cool at night to see the houses stacked up along the coast. The weather/breeze is perfect. It almost convinced me to want to move to socal.
Informative context I just looked up:
Rancho Palos Verdes is in California, on the coast near Long Beach. It looks like it's about 20 miles south of LA.
Update: Hey Californian nitpickers, I made this for you: https://i.redd.it/olrb8gqrlbad1.png
20 and a quarter miles, twenty and a half miles next week
Gonna be in Mexico by next year
What I keep telling myself as well.
Stick to the plan, Arthur!
Tahiti?
Better get passports
No they gotta go hang with Hawaii!
(Alaska can come, too)
THE END!
As noted elsewhere in the thread, this is also not a new issue and is more an alarming result of our hubris to build homes in dumb places because they're pretty.
It is really pretty though
You're not wrong. Maybe we can rebuild in these areas when we get sweet hovercraft technology. At this point of time, however, I think these homeowners need to accept the losses and move because even if its plates and not seas rising fucking them over, they're very likely to continue getting fucked over. I'm sure I'd be stubborn too if it were my multi-million dollar home tho.
This is purely a landslide, not related directly to any plate movement or fault lines. As a geology nerd who has been keeping up with the news about this area, it seems that all the rain from the last two years have saturated the dirt in the hill, causing the water table to push out the side of the hill and start sliding.
Myron Cook explains it well:
Robin williams stand up bit.
And then there’s always the aftermath where they interview some family standing in the wreckage of their beach house and they’re always going like,
“hurricane came and tore everything up. And we had just rebuilt.”
Time out. How often do you rebuild?
“every year.”
Why do you rebuild here?
“we love the view.”
Well, you may want to get some styrofoam furniture that goes up and fucking down. Some things that you can hose off maybe.
I fully support cutting FEMA funding in disaster zones for rebuilding in the zone, as well as cutting it for any construction after the issue was found.
Too many people making money doing this cycle of stupid shit.
Thanks for the context, the name was giving confusing context clues.
Would’ve been really easy to say “an area in California”, I have no idea wtf Rancho Palos Verdes is
or "an area in California, USA"
correction: 20 miles and 7-12 inches....
Thank you for this
Fwiw, Palos Verdes is also a very affluent area in LA. So as much as this sucks for them, there’s a certain bit of schadenfreude to the situation.
Well there’s PAlos verdes. Ranch o palos verdes and palos verdes estates. Not all the Same rich level
Yep, and these people are well-known to be NIMBY (not in my backyard) AF. They have beautiful hiking trails and coastal views, but routinely pass local laws closing trails or having extremely restrictive parking allowing locals only.
There’s a trump golf course right on the coast there. I hope we can at least see that sink into the sea!
🎶California tumbles into the sea🎵
You're joking but shortly after this golf course opened the 18th hole literally fell into the ocean.
near Long Beach. It looks like it's about 20 miles south of LA.
As a Brit, I tend to think of this as all a part of LA.
Surely, to anyone outside of LA, the Valley is part of LA, Anaheim is part of LA, Irving Irvine is part of LA?
Anyway, here's what Rancho Palos Verdes looks like: https://i.imgur.com/LASrcJc.jpeg
I'm an American from the east coast and I have no concept of what is and isn't part of LA
It's ginormous. I have family in Palos Verdes and in Fullerton. It's easily 90 minutes in traffic to get between their houses even though they both live "in LA."
LA County is always LA in my head.
The Greater LA
California must be an insurance nightmare. It’s seemingly always on fire, flooding, or earthquakes and now we can add separating to the list
My house has burned 14 times, been flooded 27 times and now has been destroyed by earthquake 8 times, just in the last year or two. What a nightmare.
That sounds very frustrating. Thoughts and prayers. Hope that helps
Meh, it's better than throwing gas on the fire.
Great news is if it’s on fire and falls into the sea it won’t be on fire
That's a solution right there. I'm just waiting until Bakersfield becomes beachfront property like everybody's been saying forever.
I think something wants you out of there!
Yes, but did it fall into the swamp?
It burned down, fell over and THEN sank into the swamp
It’s free real estate
Small areas do, sporadically and unpredictably. Earthquakes do basically no damage most of the time because everything is required to be retrofitted for it.
As opposed to how some parts of Florida and the Gulf coast get hit by hurricanes ten times a year every year, and people still build there.
I'm Portuguese and was thoroughly confused at first
Haha because the U.S. is made up of people from around the world, we love to reuse names from the countries we came from. I’m an American and even I find it confusing lol.
Driving through Oregon is the absolute worst. They just didn't even try to come up with new names.
Lafayette, OR
Dayton, OR
St. Paul, OR
Milwaukie, OR
Salem, OR
Dallas, OR
Kingston, OR
Niagara, OR
Detroit, OR
Paris, OR
Saginaw, OR
Lebanon, OR
Albany, OR
Ontario, OR
Phoenix, OR
Toledo, OR
Jacksonville, OR
Arlington, OR
Lexington, OR
Seneca, OR
Richmond, OR
It's so bad you literally forgot Portland, OR lol.
Honestly, there are so many more... I got bored listing them.
I think the people who named a city Boring also got bored.
Hey now... We have Boring, OR and it's at least... boring.
In one county in PA, you have Houston, California, and Washington.
I didn't really go international in Oregon..
Glasgow OR
Florence OR
Rome OR
The name is a holdover from the original land grant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ranchos_of_California
A lot of California locations have retained the names from the original land grants.
Stop bending.
Are they benders that are Portuguese or benders that can bend Portuguese people?
Bender Bending Rodrigues (40% chapa de aço), the portuguese Bender.
I’m Portuguese too and I would like to say I have absolutely nothing to do with this.
Same
Two things to note about the geology of the peninsula, it was once an island and now a big hill, and there is a lot of bentonite clay, which formed from thick layers of compressed volcanic ash deposited millions of years ago. Bentonite clay is slippery when wet, and is a major contributing factor the peninsula's land-slides.
Because of the prolific rain we received for the last two years, springs are flowing again and there is an abundance of groundwater. All this groundwater is sitting on top of the slippery non-porous bentonite clay and it's on a hillside, so all the weight is pushing the land downward. Though land movement is a characteristic of the Portuguese Bend area, it averaged 8.5 feet a year. Now it's moving about a foot a week! The current solution is to try to pump out the groundwater to alleviate the weight. I drive Palos Verdes Drive S through Portuguese Bend and they will pave a portion of the road in the morning and by the afternoon there are new splits, cracks, and folds.
Bentonite is worse than you're making it out to be. It's a truly expansive clay, one known as a 2:1 clay. It at least doubles it's volume when it gets wet and looks more like a slime than type of soil.
Bentonite is used to grout well casings, seal holes, and is often used to make cat litter. Having that anywhere near structures you want to stay in one place is a nightmare.
I know, I work in tandem with the cities on peninsula, I was just trying to make my comment as simple as possible to avoid a wall of text 😥😂
I regularly drive that road, too. It has never changed as fast as it has changed this year. Each week that one section where they constantly pave has new elevation changes.
Instead of paving they might want to consider something else... Maybe gravel...?
These are some of the wealthiest people near LA. No way would they be caught dead driving on a dirt road
Why do wealthy people like living in challenging areas? Islands with volcanic activity, right on the beach where hurricanes hit each year, snowy mountains, now places where the land folds all Willy nilly?
They have the money, why wouldn’t they
If you haven’t seen the area, it’s absolutely gorgeous.
Thats probably why
I thought it was bad when I lived on the coast and they had to repave parts of 101 three times a year due to erosion. Curious what this has done to their property values. How do you even keep track of property lines?
Any fucking time
Any fucking day
Learn to swim
I'll see you down in Arizona Bay
Mom’s gonna fix it all soon
Thought it was in Portugal xD
As it's CA, I figure it's tectonic activity ? Those rates by week are really huge !
It's an ancient landslide. The acceleration of the slide has much more to do with the above-average rainfall we've received the last two years.
One major earthquake in the near vicinity can cause soil liquifaction and trigger a cascading landslide. Hope the area that you're in doesn't have a history of major earthquakes.
Good thing California is not known for major earthquakes at all...
Yes, exactly this! The rainfall has only made it worse.
Better it moving then locking up and snapping
Yup, unless that movement is putting pressure on another fault. You are welcome, sleep well.
What if it's liquid hot magma trying to find an area to release on?
Dunno, but if you live nearby I suppose you could just turn up your air conditioner.
But it's a DRY HEAT.
Volcano remake?
That's what i say about my old man joints all the time.
Oops sorry for the confusion! Back in 1956, a road crew excavated sediment and dumped it on top of this ancient landslide zone. This rendered the area geologically unbstable and has been causing issues to this day.
Nothing tectonic about it. The town is built on a large pile of sand that has been falling into the ocean for hundreds of years. The news story in this case is that a piece of it has been falling a bit faster than usual lately.
According to the search results I got, it's an ongoing landslide. Since 1956. Double-extra WTF. Houses selling for multiple millions of dollars in the 'hood.
I’ve driven on the roads on the south end and it was so roller coastery that you actually got motion sickness. Did it for the thrills.
Can the city stop it? No. No they cannot.
RPV most DEFINITELY not the “‘hood”.
It's an active landslide. Not tectonic. We have all kinds of disasters here!
I lived there in the late 90s and it was called The Flying Triangle.
It was named after flying triangles in the sky back then, now it's all bendy.
Yeah I can see how it works.
These people bought $5+ million dollar houses in a known landslide area, and as soon as the land started sliding, immediately begged for government aid from FEMA.
not a "known landslide area" they bought those houses on TOP of an active landslide. This isn't a matter of landslides just being more common in this area, or it being steep. The ground they bought has literally been sliding towards the sea for the last 60 years and no one knows if and when it will stop.
What was the rate it was sliding before this recent acceleration? How many times were these pipes and homes rebuilt over the years?
About 5-8 feet per year. They have pipes aboveground now so the land can shift underneath.
I would have sold my house years ago what the hell.
You might not find a buyer, since you are trying to sell a house on an active landslide
Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9FGRkqUdf8
“TO WHO BEN?? FUCKING AQUAMAN!?!?”
Palos Verdes is a super posh neighborhood and very desirable. That area will be in demand for as long as civil engineers can literally prop it up.
Wait till you see what’s going on in waterfront Florida and south Texas. There are a huge amount of people living in areas humans have no place living in. Shit, even Manhattan has a lot of land fill area (expansion of the island) that’s a big storm away from completely submerged… difference is how much money you’ve got to keep the implausible possible.
What happens when you own a moving piece of land?
Does the ownership moves with the topsoil or it stays at the exact GPS coordinates it was at the beginning?
Like if your house lowly slides on top of the neighbour’s land, is the land under your house now yours? Do they now own your house?
That’s actually a really interesting conundrum.
What's more American than insisting on getting bailed out of the predictable negative consequences of your own actions?
And I bet they vote small government and no handouts to "those people"
I wish FEMA wouldn't waste funds on this kind of shit. I get that there are a lot of other people who want to rebuild their homes in the same place because it's where they've always lived, but it's still a waste of aid money. Use the money to help them rebuild their lives in an area that isn't a disaster zone instead.
Its been slidding for years. As kids, we'd dive out to see the slide ares and homes tagged. Late 60s
Offloading the cost of risk/damages but keeping profits is the name of the game
Man, those houses are going to have to be lowered to only 1.2 million.
Gee, a whole housing development built on what is essentially a cliff next to the Pacific Ocean. Who could ever have thought that was a shaky idea?
Building on a cliff next to the ocean is fine.
Building on a 'cliff' that is actually in reality just a huge sand dune mixed in with boulders is where the problem lies.
Geology either goes super slow or crazy fast it seems like.
Well, you hear less about the geology things that are at medium speeds because it happens slow enough people could relocate and they want to ignore the scientists who warn them it's happening. Like how they knew Mt St Helens was going to go off and they had to force people to listen. Or even like this, they knew the land was slumping for years, but decided to ride it out.
I love the story of the old mountain man who lived on My St Helens, he became a local celebrity - hero for defying the scientists and authorities and stubbornly refused to leave, his body was never found!
Harry R. Truman!
My parents live here (and I grew up here). It’s always been bad to a certain extent, but this year is by far the worst. To the point where they had to take down one of the oldest landmarks in the area (Wayfarer’s Chapel) because it’s in immediate danger of collapsing. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-13/wayfarers-chapel-disassembled-landslide
Cool. Setup a time-lapse.
I grew up in the neighboring town driving the famous road along the coast. Many movies, shows, and commercials have been filmed along this road. It was always bumpy but holy shit it’s gotten bad along one particular part that has constantly been moving for decades. When I drove it this past weekend, it was almost impassable. Most people were driving 10 mph because of how terrible the road has become.
Are you talking about that part where it feels like you’re going down on a roller coaster? Right before that snaking road that people always park on top of.
Enjoyable ride from Hollyhood to there. Always fun to ride my motorcycle along that stretch. I don't know the name either, but that hill hits so right when zipping down it on a bike. I should try and get a ride in over the weekend before that whole area slides off.
Unfortunately you’ll never do it again, I think they closed it to 2 wheeled vehicles and bicycles until the “shifting is reduced” which is expected to happen sometime after it shifts into the ocean.
That undulating road is quite a thing to behold, assuming it's still there after all this.
They just voted to close the main drag (not from there, probably the road you mention) to anything with 2 wheels due to shifting. They said it will be closed until “the shifting can be reduced” which is a ridiculous statement unless they have Captain Planet on hand or something.
This is like 10 miles from “Sunken city.” A part of San Pedro that essentially slid into the ocean.
Been to some cool parties down in Sunken City. It's a pain in the ass to get out of intoxicated, though.
Sunken city.” A part of San Pedro
From wikipedia:
Experts investigating the landslide said that the ground was shifting at a rate of 11 inches (280 mm) per day
Emphasis mine
This is not terribly far from Sunken City, an area made mildly internet famous because of how interesting the remaining parts of a neighborhood that fell into the ocean in a 1929 landslide look.
I’m originally from Palos Verdes and it is bad over here.
We had a landslide that took out several homes a year ago. In addition, Wayfarer’s Chapel is closed with plans underway to try and relocate it to a more stable area.
Yup, we were called out to some of those homes and the damage was severe to say the least.
This area has been a landslide for 250,000 years, must be a great place to build.
Who is responsible for updating all the maps for gps, navigation, municipal services, and general locations of objects? If it's moving 12 inches a week, I imagine that within a couple months tops, people's nav apps are going to start failing.
Inb4 the freshly recalled cybertruck fully self drives it's owner into the ocean and won't release the doors as a "protective feature".
Lol, do they still own the remaining land after all their houses shift into the ocean or do they own part of the ocean now?
good thing they all have shit tons of money.
Portuguese Bend is…bending.
And yet still house prices are in the millions lol
They built in a fucking arroyo. Of course it's going to shift.
These people sued the city of RPV because the whole area was condemned and not allowed to be built because of landslide movement. They won and were allowed to build, and guess what the land slide movement didn't suddenly stop, so now they are suing the city for allowing them to build. Fuck those people.
If they can afford property in PV they can afford this too 🤣🤣🤣
Per...week?? Whew damn!
I live in the South Bay, which is where this is located in Los Angeles. AMA.
Also, bunch of people in the palos verdes peninsula area are entitled rich fucks. Just saying.
Nuevo Sunken City.
Arizona Bay properties are going to skyrocket anytime soon…
This sounds like some "Welcome to the Night Vale" shit
7-12” a week?! That’s crazy fast in geological terms.
How would a surveyor deal with this? Does your land shift with the physical land or do you own gps coordinates?
Learn to swim! Learn to swim!
"Threatening"? Looks like it's already fucking shit up pretty badly.
Yeah you probably shouldn’t build shit there
So you’re saying it’s their fault?
Earth is killing us faster than expected
Rancho Palos Verdes is a city in California for those who don't know like myself who had to look it up. It's south of Los Angeles on the coast.