Slip Slidin' Away: Rancho Palos Verdes
An ancient landslide has reactivated
This video is about the conditions in Rancho Palos Verdes. Basically there’s about a square mile of land where a slow moving 160’ deep landslide has been a known issue for a century. Our recent rains have revealed a much older, much larger 300’ deep slide that is again moving.
The city has a $40m annual budget, has spent $24m trying to remediate this trouble by dewatering, and they’re extracting about six acre feet of water an hour. Knowing only the 160’ deep slide, that is what they tried to fix. There’s no estimate on the hazard of this ancient slide. We’re entering La Niña so that means our mild fire season and wet winter are about to give way to a big dry, which will slow this problem for anywhere from a year to a decade. But El Niño and La Niña take turns, and those climate change driven atmospheric rivers will be back.
It’s a beautiful area, I’d love to live there, even now, but it’s a place to camp, not a place to make a long term investment in a fixed structure. This brief video gives a different perspective on the problem.
Policy Issue:
This is a slow motion problem, but policy wise it’s the same problem as California’s urban wildland interface construction. Humans like to snuggle right up to large forests, but when they periodically explode, like in Santa Rosa and Paradise, it is the height of foolishness to rebuild there.
Georgia and the Carolinas interior are having this same conversation after Helene. Florida is about to meet Milton, which looks set to bullseye Tampa, but a little twitch to the left will send it just south of the area already ravaged by Helene.
The Insurance Sector Collapse Process is progressing. There are 280 homes in the affected area of Rancho Palos Verdes, with a nominal value of about half a billion dollars. I’m not sure if these homes would be covered under FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements), which also has $392 billion in in exposure, but this is NOT like the wildland interface problem.
Home owners there can trim brush, clean gutters, remodel their exteriors to limit ingress points for flying embers, and dramatically reduce their exposure. When you’ve built on a landslide … in some cases suing the city in order to use land that was considered too hazardous for use … any remediation is a collective act, not individual.
RPV spent 5% of the value of those homes in a single year just slowing down that landslide. Moving from focusing on a 160’ thick layer to a 300’ thick layer isn’t going to just double the cost, nor will quintupling the area to be dewatered merely produce a 5x increase. If you have to spend half the value of the combined properties year after year, I would argue that the loss has already occurred.
Conclusion:
We’ve got disasters, fast and slow, from coast to coast. Politicians can dissemble and spin, Florida man can blaze away at the hurricane du jour, but Mother Nature is DONE with our shit.
Sooner or later, we’re all going to get a taste of this.
