Geologists checking hillsides threatening Southern California apartment buildings as more rain falls
As the latest rain storms saturated the region, officials were keeping a watchful eye on landslide areas in San Clemente and Newport Beach, where recent hillside collapses prompted the evacuation of homes and apartment buildings.
In San Clemente, heavy rain during the morning Tuesday caused a few more feet of debris to fall, but no structural movement was detected as of the afternoon between storms, said Mayor Chris Duncan.
Four apartment buildings, with about 20 units between them, were red-tagged last week when concrete decks and the hillside collapsed down the bluff and onto the popular beach trail in North Beach.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, but it’s good that we didn’t have any other structures failing,” Duncan said Tuesday afternoon.
City engineers were onsite monitoring through the storm and property owners are starting to bring in their own geo-technical engineers for evaluations, Duncan said. “We will keep it red-tagged for safety, it’s up to the property owners to come and clear the building.”
There’s a chance, he said, the buildings were not compromised in the landslide and the damage was just on the deck areas.
“That’s what we’re hoping for,” he said. “If their experts are able to demonstrate the structures are safe, that will be a benefit for their owners, who I’m sure have been concerned their entire property could be lost.”
Beyond some emergency resources, Duncan said after researching what assistance might be available from city, county, state and federal resources, there wasn’t really financial help the government could offer renters with finding short-term solutions because doing so would be considered a gift of public funds for people’s living expenses, Duncan said.
“We’re doing everything we can to bridge this gap and making connections to resources,” he said. “We hope, with any luck, we can get many of them into their residences and homes so they can get to some sort of normalcy.”
Duncan said he hopes state and federal legislators will revisit the limitations on helping in these situations for future disasters.
“It would not be a great expense, but a great help for these folks if they were able to have some assistance getting settled in on a temporary basis,” he said. “This has opened people’s eyes, including at a city level, that we can do more to prepare, and that we can improve our responsiveness and effectiveness in dealing with the next situation when it comes.”
The city has also reached out to the local business community to see about available work stations because some people were working from home, he said.
“It’s tragic, frustrating for these individuals,” he said. “But they will get through it and we will try and help them as much as we can. We will do after-action reporting to see how we can improve next time.”
In Newport Beach, crews were at the hillside in the Back Bay that had a landslide early this month, extracting groundwater. There was an issue with one of the pumps diverting storm water from a drain that was damaged that sent the water into the street earlier in the day, said the city’s spokesperson John Pope.
There have been no reports of more land movement threatening homes, he said. One home was demolished last week after being red-tagged; the two houses on either side are having private contractors shore up their properties and have plans to drive pilings into the dirt to strengthen the hillside. The city expedited approval of the permits so they could get the work down quickly, Pope said.
“These are short-term measures and they will be looking at longer-term actions as well,” Pope said. “They wanted to take action to stabilize the hill as soon as possible.”