‘They just can’t take this kind of beating’: California mansions on the brink

The latest storm battering the California coast has brought fresh flooding, mudslides, sinkholes and coastal erosion to the state — but the three mansions atop the cliffs of Dana Point remain anchored in place.

After a chunk of those cliffs sloughed off amid an atmospheric river earlier this month, the views from Scenic Drive in Orange County became even more dramatic, as the houses suddenly had very little separating them from the Pacific Ocean below.

The owner of the multimillion-dollar home closest to the landslide, Lewis Bruggeman, has told various media outlets that his house is stable despite its perilous appearance. And city officials have said the home is anchored to the bedrock. But an executive with an engineering firm that said it visited and assessed the property after the slide said future storms and rains are “going to continue to eat away at the slopes.”

“That’s going to need major, major work to stabilize that property,” said Kyle Tourjé, executive vice president of Alpha Structural, a Los Angeles engineering firm that specializes in soil and structural work. Bruggeman did not respond to The Washington Post’s requests for comment.

The erosion of the sheer cliffs is just one vivid example of the sloughing and sliding happening across Southern California as heavy rains this month have swollen rivers and waterlogged the soil. Tourjé said his firm has responded for emergency assessments and repairs for over 60 landslides in the past week in Southern California, a particularly heavy load.

“The rainy seasons always get busy for us, but this one’s beginning to change the game a little bit,” he said. “We’re seeing more damage, and I think we will continue to see more significant damage. Between back-to-back years of heavy saturation, these houses, these properties … they just can’t take this kind of beating.”

‘They just can’t take this kind of beating’: California mansions on the brink

The recent rains have accelerated a slow-moving process of ground movement over hundreds of acres in Rancho Palos Verdes, an affluent seaside city in Los Angeles County. The shifting and slumping land has damaged homes and caused water and gas leaks. Crews have been working to fill in fissures, and engineers have described the recent movement as unprecedented for the area.

“Because the ground’s already saturated, all this rain certainly does not help; it makes it worse,” Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor John Cruikshank said in an interview. “People in their homes have seen lots of new movement. Areas that were only moving in inches are now moving in feet per year.”

The city has dealt with landslides for decades, but the past two wet winters have accelerated the movement. In recent months, two homes have been red-tagged — deemed unsafe for occupancy — and the city closed eight miles of trails because of safety issues from open fissures, Cruikshank said. Wayfarers Chapel, a popular ocean-view wedding venue known as the “glass church,” also closed earlier this month because of earth movement.

“Clearly with that much glass above the temple area and being so precarious, you just can’t leave that open,” he said. “That would be way, way too dangerous.”

Cruikshank said the city will be asking Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to declare a state of emergency specifically for Rancho Palos Verdes. He said there is typically a delay of a week or more from a heavy rain to reports of new movement, as water seeps into the soil, so he worries what the current rainstorm will mean for his city.

“We’re always just dreading the fact that someone new might call and say they’ve got something major in their homes,” he said.

An aerial image shows vehicles driving on a damaged section of road past the Wayfarers Chapel in a landslide prone area following its closure due to land movement after heavy rains in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on February 16, 2024. The church, designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, features glass walls and a connection to coastal nature of the Pacific Ocean.

The rain that fell in downtown Los Angeles over three days earlier this month amounted to more than half of the average accumulation for a year.

Since the weekend, thunderstorms, high winds and rain have swollen rivers and caused flooding and landslides in different parts of the state. In Los Angeles and Ventura counties, the state Department of Transportation announced road closures due to erosion, sinkholes and mudslides — including on stretches of the scenic Pacific Coast Highway.

“It’s been very wet for February,” said Bob Oravec, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. “The winter is the wet season for California, but still, these amounts are really heavy.”

The heavy rain over the past two winters has been a boon to the state’s reservoirs, which had fallen to critical lows after years of drought. Most are fuller than normal, and the two largest — Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville — are above 80 percent capacity. The storms have dropped heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains, but snowpack for the year remains below average.

Matt Thomas, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Landslide Hazards Program, said the recent storms in California have so far not produced widespread landslides across the state’s mountain ranges. While a lot of rain fell, it didn’t fall with the type of intensity that can generate those type of major landscape movements. Instead, the problem has been focused in heavily developed urban hillsides in Southern California.

Days after a powerful atmospheric river storm and several heavy rain storms, a slide developed near Big Creek Bridge on US Highway 1 along with several other slides farther south down the highway in Big Sur, California on Saturday February 10, 2024. The infamous Paul’s Slide even farther south down US Highway 1 still remains unrepaired from 2023’s major atmospheric storms. These slides further isolate the communities along that stretch of US Highway 1.

The latest storm has hit developed coastal counties hard, amassing more than 10 inches over the past three days in some places, including hilly areas that have already been inundated by earlier downpours. The heaviest rains on Tuesday are expected in Southern California between Los Angeles and San Diego, Oravec said.

“Anytime you get 5 to 10 inches of rain on those hills you’re going to have problems with landslides,” he said.

The erosion of the headlands in Dana Point on Feb. 8 prompted concern that three large homes might be at risk of falling over the cliff. But the city said in a statement released to various media outlets last week that a building inspector and a geotechnical engineer had assessed the area.

“At this point, the City has deemed that no additional action is necessary, and out of an abundance of caution has recommended that the property owner contract for a professional engineering assessment of the property,” the statement read.

Dana Point City Manager Mike Killebrew did not respond to a request for comment.

“The house is fine, it’s not threatened and it will not be red-tagged,” Bruggeman told KCAL-TV last week. “The city agrees that there’s no major structural issue with the house.”

The other homeowners on the cliff did not respond to requests for comment.

Alpha Structural officials said they visited the Scenic Drive landslide site at Bruggeman’s request. The firm said it couldn’t provide a detailed report on its assessment or recommendations for the home.

An aerial image shows homes along Scenic Drive standing on the edge of a cliff above the Pacific Ocean after a landslide following heavy rains in Dana Point, California, on February 15, 2024. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

Tourjé said such bluffs in general can sometimes be fortified by netting or by spraying a seed mix of native plants with deep roots onto the slope.

“Planting and ground cover are these most practical and effective proactive maintenance one can do,” he said.

But the storms this month have left a trail of destruction far beyond Dana Point. Tourjé attributes much of the problem to development decades ago under insufficient building and grading codes. Residents often make problems worse, he said, by directing roof downspouts or pool runoff pipes onto vulnerable slopes. He and his colleagues have been racing to Malibu beachfront homes with the sand below them scoured away, train lines wiped out by landslides, homes knocked down, swimming pools filled with mud.

“It seems to be getting progressively worse, year after year,” he said.