Broken sidewalks, crumbling houses: people evacuated as LA cliffside shifts

Hillside homes in an affluent southern California community crumbled and cracked over the weekend as the land beneath them shifted and slid into a canyon below, forcing residents to evacuate.

More than a dozen residents of the Rolling Hills Estates in Los Angeles county rushed to leave on Saturday after the sidewalks fractured and houses splintered.

“We have never seen this kind of damage to our infrastructure,” city councilmember Frank Zerunyan said on Twitter after the incident. “Mother Nature has not been kind to several homes. They are about to be at the bottom of the canyon very soon.”

After cracks were discovered in one home on Saturday, officials with the Los Angeles county fire department ordered those in 12 adjacent homes to vacate as energy providers shut off power and gas to the area.

“They discovered cracks along the structure of one building, and upon further investigation they realized that there were some cracks running through one home specifically, and it was progressing to the next home,” Capt Chiyoshi Hasegawa of the LA fire department told KTLA, a local news team. “We got additional specialists to assess the situation, and after assessing the situation we realized there were 12 homes that had received damage either inside of their home or outside of the structure.”

Walls and roofs began to fail as foundations continued to slide – and the land hasn’t yet settled. “Homes have been pulled off their foundations,” Janice Hahn, the chair of the Los Angeles county board of supervisors said in an update on Twitter. “The land is continuing to move, but the evacuation order continues to be limited to these 12 homes.”

The city is collaborating with county agencies and the Red Cross to support displaced residents, according to Britt Huff, the city’s mayor, as officials investigate what caused the cliffsides to collapse. But this is not the first time a damaging slide has impacted the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which rises high above the Pacific on the county’s south coast and offers residents spectacular views of the ocean and greater Los Angeles.

For decades, the city has been grappling with the slow-motion aftermath of a landslide that began in 1956, which destroyed 140 homes in the Portuguese Bend area of the city of Rancho Palos Verdes. The earth has continued to move, sliding roughly 8ft a year according to officials, shifting both vertically and horizontally. Deep fissures have opened between homes and the city invests roughly $1m a year to smooth cracks in a buckling cliffside road, according to the Los Angeles Times.