Opinion | Its coastal California landslide season again. Watch your step.

Jennifer Allen’s most recent book is “Mālama Honua, Hōkūle‘a — A Voyage of Hope.”

It’s coastal California landslide season, and our rain-soaked earth has expanded, sliding mud, rock and roots down canyons, dislodging homes, blurring property lines and draining cliffs into the Pacific. In February, Los Angeles had more than 12 inches of rain, nearing our typical total rainfall for an entire year. On its southern peninsula, three slide zones that once moved independently are now flowing together toward the ocean. This landslide complex creeps year-round as it has for 250,000 years, but never have I seen these hills so fluid.

To get a sense of where we are, come stand near the head of the landslide in Rancho Palos Verdes, above the Portuguese Bend Reserve, an expanse of canyons, meadows, mustard, anise, eucalyptus and sage overlooking the ocean. On a wide-sky day, you can see Catalina Island and, closer, the channel where gray whales make their springtime trek north to cooler waters. The whales are a reminder of the Azorean whalers who once harvested whale oil along the shores of Portuguese Bend Cove and Abalone Cove. Long ago, this entire peninsula rose up from the Pacific, allowing waves to carve terraces and cliff-sharp edges. The very crest you stand on arches downslope like the hollowed-out face of a massive wave. You might wonder, as I have lately, if even taking one step closer to its edge could trigger another major land collapse.

This is what happened in 1956, when Los Angeles County workers, in an attempt to extend nearby Crenshaw Boulevard to Palos Verdes Drive below, dumped some 186,300 tons of fill directly onto the landslide head, activating a stream of earth that coursed through the Portuguese Bend Beach Club and ended at Portuguese Bend Cove. Along the way, 145 homes were destroyed.

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There have been other slides between that one and today, but none as vigorous as the current one, now moving at four times its usual rate. Since January 2023, the private neighborhood of Portuguese Bend has tallied 37 water breaks or leaks; 18 gas leaks; nine sewer leaks or failure; and one fallen utility pole. The Bend is a bucolic equestrian community. No curbs, no streetlights, sketchy internet. You’re more likely to see a horse coming down the cracked road than a Benz, more likely to see a Bobcat subcompact tractor than a SoCal family golf cart.

I once lived here, renting a no-heat, septic-served, stucco casita. The land had its demands. You deferred to the rattlesnake sheltering in the shade of your porch, gave space to the tarantula crawling on the bookshelf. Wild peacocks had the loudest and final say. In winter, when rain turned canyons into conduits and drought-dry creek beds into rivers, natural waterways had the right of way. You learned to wait out the strongest storms like the horses in the stables: with patience and civility. We all knew this land was bigger and wilder than we could ever dare to be, and that’s why we loved it. Eventually, I left, and recently considered returning but decided against it. I couldn’t live within the current man vs. nature battleground. Loving it and living within it have become two separate things.

The main fire and utility emergency access road lies at the top of the slide zone; it is now impassable. Southern California Edison recently had to use a helicopter to remove one of its deactivated utility poles in the canyon; it plans to remove 40 more. The Abalone Cove Landslide Abatement District, the state’s first district of its kind, is in Portuguese Bend and has been able to handle most of the land movement emergencies. The community manages 18 dewatering wells that suck out 130,000 gallons of water a day. Neighbors haul hay bales to block off fallen road and help each other fill fissures and smooth mud-covered roads. Palos Verdes Drive South remains the sole emergency evacuation route, a two-lane road that changes shape, tilt and sway continually. Decades ago, in response to the perpetual land shifts, the Los Angeles County Sanitation District moved sewage channels above ground, installing two parallel 14-inch, 7,200-feet-long pipelines along the shoulders of the drive. Sanitation workers patrol these pipes seven days a week, watchful for leaks or breaks. A slip of land could cause a rupture, releasing thousands of gallons of raw sewage into the Abalone Cove Ecological Reserve. Since last May, the city of Rancho Palos Verdes estimates it has spent $1 million repaving the drive, the main artery on this side of the peninsula that handles some 15,000 vehicles daily.

Each era has had an answer. The current answer has earned the city of Rancho Palos Verdes a $23.33 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for its proposed Portuguese Bend Landslide Remediation Project, an estimated $33 million plan that has been in the works since 2017. Last October, when the city declared a state of emergency, and then in February, when the governor declared a countywide state of emergency (followed this week by a federal disaster declaration from President Biden), the city applied emergency measures to fend off the slide, including relaxing the permits and environmental review requirements to commence the project. The proposed remediation involves filling fissures, drilling to install five horizontal dewatering systems with multiple 1,200-foot drains, and constructing one main 4,500-foot-long, 14- to 26-foot-wide drainage swale running from the emergency access road through the reserve to Palos Verdes Drive. Three additional swales will divert canyon waters directly into the main drain to unite in a 10-acre “detention basin,” slowing the storm water surge into a single culvert before discharging it to the ocean. This drainage system will be surfaced to prevent water from entering the soil. Can you see it? One engineered water highway, with three merging channels, all lined with an impermeable, geosynthetic plastic membrane.

“If we don’t execute our plan, the one that we have in place for the Portuguese Bend landslide, there’s not going to be a reserve to protect anymore,” a city council member stated during a February meeting. Hearing this, I was confused. Was this remediation plan intended to protect the reserve or to tame it?

Fault, Failure, Fissures. The land isn’t falling apart. We are. A few weeks ago, after heavy rains, a ledge of Big Sur’s scenic highway collapsed, slipping off the cliffs into the ocean. In time, the slip will be analyzed, the hill propped up, the highway paved. Every season, we try to creatively control the terrain, yet each effort seems only to provoke its eventual path.

“The toe is gone,” a local shows me at the Portuguese Bend Beach Club. The toe, the mound of land that once theoretically kept the hill from entirely slipping, seems to have dissolved into the ocean. A dislodged rusty pipe, concrete slabs, a barnacled brick — middens of our industrialized lives are spewed on the tidal rocks. You can’t swim or surf here. Too shallow. Who knows what may lie just beneath the water’s surface.

On this springtime day, the tide is exceptionally low, the sky clear, and I pause to take in its beauty. The wind is blowing offshore, the ocean pumping out perfect hollow swells, inviting and unforgiving.

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