Expert Available: The Landslides of a Southern California Coastal Community

The landscape in Rancho Palos Verdes, California is changing and it’s happening faster than engineers might have anticipated. According to The Washington Post, recent landslides have damaged or destroyed homes atop Rancho Palos Verdes’s picturesque bluffs and in recent days have forced indefinite gas and electricity outages. California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for the Rancho Palos Verdes landslide last week.

Land beneath the city in Los Angeles County has been slowly shifting for decades, a peninsula that is especially vulnerable to wind and weather that also happens to sit on a fault line. An active landslide on the southern side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula has been going on since 1956 and two especially wet winters have hit the area particularly hard, exacerbating the situation.

If you would like more context on this matter, please consider Lisa Benton-Short, professor of geography at the George Washington University. Benton-Short is an urban geographer with an interest in the dynamics of the urban environment from many angles, including: urban sustainability, planning and public space, monuments and memorials, urban national parks, globalization, and immigration. She has authored several books, including Urban Sustainability in the US: Cities Take and most recently, Sustainability and Sustainable Development: an Introduction.

Benton-Short says the landslides in the Palos Verdes region is another story about building where we shouldn’t and about a fallacy that human ingenuity can overcome mother nature. She also visited Rancho Palos Verdes last spring and says the amount of road work in the peninsula to repair areas where the road had shifted apart was very visible.

If you would like to speak with Prof. Benton-Short, please contact GW Senior Media Relations Specialist Cate Douglass at [email protected].

-GW-