Nothing to See Here

As blog readers will know, UCLA spent $80 million back in 2022 to buy the campus of a defunct Catholic college in Palos Verdes with great ocean views. It was said that this purchase was somehow related to pressures from the legislature to increase student enrollment. The former college, however, had an enrollment of only a few hundred. And the Palos Verdes site is hard to reach from Westwood.

Apart from those issues, Palos Verdes has had well-publicized problems of ground movement at a nearby location known as Portuguese Bend, which we have highlighted on this blog.

Now, there seems to be another slide. From LAist:

Rancho Palos Verdes officials say 400 feet of coastal bluff that fell toward the ocean on Saturday night is not related to the land movement that's been ripping part of the city apart for years. The bluff dropped approximately 60 feet toward the ocean. But Megan Barnes, a spokesperson for the city, told LAist there was no damage to public property, no injuries and no structural damage to the four homes affected. There is significant soil damage to their backyards, though.

The cause of the incident on Marguerite Drive is still being investigated, she added...

Full story at https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/rancho-palos-verdes-cloastal-bluff-landslide-ocean.

The Good News is that the new slide is about 8 miles from the UCLA site, whereas the old slide was about 3 miles away. The Bad News is that the entire coastal area seems to be unsteady. It's interesting that city officials seem anxious to say that the new slide is unrelated to the old one lest someone think poorly of local real estate. (I think Ibsen wrote a play about that approach to civic affairs.) However, the idea that unrelated slides can pop up anywhere along the coast is not reassuring. But what do I know?