A geological engineering firm is expected to start a probe this week into the specific source of the slide, but history suggests water created the instability.
Residents won’t know what triggered the landslide thatin Rolling Hills Estates until a geological engineering firm completes a probe slated to begin this week. But while there’s no clear smoking gun, as of yet, history — and the natural geology of the Palos Verdes Peninsula — all point to one leading suspect: water.
A sudden burst of water, such as a water main break, could create a landslide, but so could prolonged rainfall, or a tiny leak from a damaged pool or a poorly installed irrigation system, over the course of weeks or months, he said. Clay is porous, meaning it holds water for a long time, but it isn’t very permeable, so it similarly takes a long time for water to pass through it, creating a bottleneck beneath the surface.
She believes these types of disasters will likely happen more often as climate change increases the frequency of extreme weather events that used to be considered “50-year storms.”Delayed land movements, called “deep-seated landslides,” aren’t always attributable to a single event, experts say. The heavy rainfall could have created the conditions for a landslide, only for another incident — such as a leak — to add the final straw.
Randy and Rina Troy view the remnants of their house on Peartree Lane in Rolling Hills Estates, destroyed in a landslide a week ago, on Friday, July 14, 2023.
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