‘Hell no, we’re not leaving’: A California community defies evacuation warning as ancient landslide rips their homes apart

By Emma Tucker, CNN

Rancho Palos Verdes, California (CNN) — Residents living on the largest area of natural vegetation on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, used to call the coastal ground movement slowly shifting beneath their feet the best thing that ever happened to them.

An ancient complex of landslides under the Portuguese Bend Reserve, located within the larger Palos Verdes Nature Preserve, was activated in 1956, which halted all housing development in the area. That allowed many of the homeowners to buy their properties for far less than what they would later be worth after undergoing extensive renovations.

For hundreds of years, the Portuguese Bend barely felt any movement from the gradually shifting landslide complex. But this year, residents living in the community’s 140 homes started to see cracks in the ground – in their closets, bedrooms and gardens – steadily getting bigger and ripping apart their properties as the land movement began to accelerate following two years of severe storms starting in 2022.

The devastation caused by the landslide started last winter. But residents say the origins of the crisis started in 1956, when city officials greenlighted the construction of 200 homes and seven miles of roads along the top of a canyon. The construction that year happened at the same time the area experienced landslide movement, causing destruction to around 150 homes and deeming the area unsuitable for housing development, according to the city of Ranchos Palos Verdes.

“The slide in 1956 stopped development here for a long time and the houses were undervalued, so people moved here because they loved the beauty in the ocean, and they weren’t looking to make a fortune or anything like that,” said Sheri Hastings, who moved to the neighborhood with her husband in 1979.

“They moved here because they loved the pure nature of this place, which is now, unfortunately, being undermined. It’s ironic in a way.”

The community resents the notion they are as affluent as the other residents of Rancho Palos Verdes who live closer to the shoreline in stunning multimillion dollar homes overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They tout themselves as self-sufficient – a community of artists, including jewelry makers, painters, sculptors, as well as handymen, engineers, teachers and writers.

Rancho Palos Verdes, west of Long Beach in the southwestern corner of Los Angeles County, was incorporated in 1973. Officials say the land there has been shifting slowly for decades, but the problem has worsened over the last 12 months, with some areas moving up to 10 inches a week.

“You can almost see the ground move,” said city council member David Bradley.

The winding drive through the rolling hills into the city, with its sprawling ocean views, feels like entering a paradise, as one passes scores of cacti and coastal pine trees, with an endless blue horizon. After passing a luxury resort and approaching the entrance of Portuguese Bend, the stunning sights are eclipsed by exposed piping, collapsed houses, ripped up roads and scores of workmen on nearly every intersection. Two homes on the bend have already been red tagged, meaning they are not safe to live in.

Southern California Edison cut off electricity to the homes in Portuguese Bend last week, an outage that it says is indefinite because the shifting ground threatens utility poles and raises the risk of fires. City officials followed by issuing an evacuation warning.

Rancho Palos Verdes has been under a local state of emergency since October 2023, and natural gas service was shut off in Portuguese Bend on July 29. And law enforcement has stepped up patrols and launched drones in Portuguese Bend to look for looting.

Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in the city last week, which will allow emergency officials to direct state resources toward responding to the threat of the land movement.

Meanwhile, nearby restaurants have been donating food to the community, and neighbors have been gathering weekly in an outdoor space to share spaghetti dinners since they can’t cook at home. The conversations are mostly about whether they have hot water and how their cracks are doing.

“This is unprecedented,” Rancho Palos Verdes City Council member Barbara Ferraro said last week. “No one knows really, in a way, what to do.”

But Sallie Reeves, 82, whose house was torn apart by the landslide, is more certain. She says she and other residents are adamant about staying. The message, she says, is not just, “We are staying, but it’s a resounding, ‘hell no, we’re not leaving.’”

Reeves knows of only three families who had no choice but to leave their homes without electricity due to medical reasons. The residents were not forced out of their homes, they say, because they were able to keep the sewage system up and running after the electricity was cut.

Outraged after city officials gave them less than a day’s notice before shutting off their electricity, a group of handymen banded together last weekend to put in place a septic system along with solar panels and generators for energy supply.

Reeves and her husband bought their property as a “fixer upper” and replaced “every surface” in the home where they raised their two children, she said, adding that it became a second home to their grandchildren.

The retired school psychologist is the 24-hour caregiver for her husband, who is disabled after suffering two strokes. She had been the one going around with bottles of wine and cookies for her neighbors who started seeing damage from landslide movement, until “all of a sudden, it was me,” needing help from her neighbors, Reeves said.

The destruction started with a crack in Reeves’ bedroom closet, which only got bigger, forcing them to move into their living room. Soon, the house started dropping on one side, making it unsafe for her husband to walk. The couple is now displaced and living in their garage, which Reeves calls a cottage.

Reeves considers every person in her community her friend, crediting their support as the reason she and her husband are able stay in the home they built together.

“I can’t leave my husband now. He’s in a new environment and it’s very disorienting to him,” she said. “We love it here. We’re not leaving. We’re resilient…Over the years, you just learn to be.”

Residents to city leaders: ‘Leave us alone’

For homeowners in Portuguese Bend, insurance does not cover the exuberant costs associated with fixing up the properties that are destroyed by landslide movement.

Sheri Hastings, 64, said her family has spent at least $600,000 since late 2023 when she started seeing cracks in one of the walls of the eight-stall barn on her property, which she and her engineer husband bought for $250,000 in 1984.

“Unusually high rain by itself over two years wouldn’t be a problem, but unusually high rain directed into an active landslide is a problem,” Hastings said. “All that water restarted the landslide, and this is a place that has not moved in thousands of years.”

Rainfall is one of the most common triggers of landslides and scientists warn the slides could become more frequent as the climate crisis fuels heavier rainfall and more powerful storms.

The horse trainer said the crisis has been devastating for her family. And she’s now without a job after the expanding landslide fissures destroyed her horse stables, forcing her to put her business on pause.

“You would be in the barn and you would hear the nails popping. You would hear ‘bang, bang, bang’ like gunshots going off and then all of sudden you would hear a panel collapse,” Hastings said.

Last week, city manager Ara Mihranian said the city’s “partnership” with the community helped keep the sewer system operating while the power was off. That enraged residents like Hastings who say they hooked up generators to the sewer pumps to keep the system running themselves with “zero help.”

Hastings accuses the city of having “no plan and no idea where people would go” when they issued an evacuation warning last week.

When asked about accountability, Hastings said she just wants the city to “leave us alone.”

“We can take care of this ourselves,” she continued. “We don’t want the city involved in our affairs. We want them out of here, leave us alone, let us fix this ourselves, because they’re completely ineffective. Any money that should be going to the city should be going to us, because we can take care of it.”

“We are working as partners with residents to solve problems as they arise, and in the case of generators to sustain the sewer system, the City provided the professional electricians to modify our sewer system pumps to support the use of resident-provided generators,” Jennifer Vaughn, a spokesperson for Rancho Palos Verdes, told CNN via email. “Meanwhile, we continue to explore long-term mobile power solutions that will sustain the sewer system operations.”

Defiant residents stay and rebuild their homes

Tom Redfield’s home, perched on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, was in “miserable shape” when he bought it over 30 years ago for around $300,000. He says he redid every inch of the house, in which the floors and walls of each room are lined with his own paintings, along with art made by his great grandfather, the American Impressionist artist Edward Willis Redfield.

Redfield said he’s grateful for the 1956 landslide halting development in his community because “this place would have been plastered with houses.”

A rifle stays perched alongside the base of the couch frame because Redfield says he’s extremely worried about his house being looted.

His home, previously featured in magazines, now rests on steel high beams, and he spends the weekends working with a close friend and neighbor slowly lifting the house to mitigate damage from the landslide fissures ripping it apart. Redfield says he has no plans on leaving the home he built from the ground up.

He is the last member of the original group of seven artists who started an artist colony in Portuguese Bend who still lives in the neighborhood.

“It’s the quality of life and just a group of like-minded people came together. You might be a great painter, but we might not want you because you might be bullheaded or a problem. I sort of fit in because I’m a soldier, I don’t want to lead nothing,” he said.

Reeves has similar feelings – she’s determined to stay and rebuild her family’s home despite an uncertain future.

Days after the electricity was cut, Reeves said she’s “lucky to have this kind of energy” at her age. She had boxes and containers spread out in each room, piling into each one every item in her home.

Her house must be emptied, Reeves said, because she started lifting the house and lowering it on a new subfloor supported by cribbing and wooden beams. When asked if she was worried about the risk of the same destruction happening again after her house is lifted, Reeves said bluntly: “There will always be a risk.”

Reeves says it’s “not true” that people in her community are wealthy. “We’ve carefully saved our money so that we could live comfortably here when we retire and we did that,” she says. The damage to the home Reeves and her husband purchased for around $300,000 has cost them over $700,000, but she still sees herself as lucky.

“We are so lucky to be here, now, still, after all these years. Forty-two years and it never cracked,” Reeves said. “The only way I’m leaving here is in a box.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Carroll Alvarado and Laura Paddison contributed to this report.