More than two dozen homes in and around ongoing landslide movement in the western Palos Verdes Peninsula are set to have their electricity restored weeks — and, in some cases, months — after they were cut off from the vital utility.
The decision comes days after Rancho Palos Verdes officials reported significant slowing across the area’s long-standing landslides. For months, the movement had been accelerating and expanding, damaging homes, cracking roadways and upending life across the Portuguese Bend area. The movement has also repeatedly required electric and natural-gas utilities to repair their infrastructure, prompting them to shut off services to almost 300 homes.
But on Thursday, Southern California Edison for the first time announced plans to restore electricity in the area, with 28 homes in Rancho Palos Verdes and Rolling Hills set to regain electricity as early as Friday.
“Assuming that we can do so safely … as early as tomorrow we will be re-energizing some customers there in the Palos Verdes Peninsula,” Gabriela Ornelas, a spokesperson for Southern California Edison, said Thursday afternoon. Ornelas said the homes that were expected to have their power restored had been notified, though she said it could take some time to repower some homes because of safety concerns with the equipment of homeowners who had installed off-grid power options.
The utility company had previously cited dangerous land movement as the reason it could no longer safely provide power to the area. Ornelas continued to call it a dynamic situation.
“Future conditions could require us to turn power off again due to public safety,” she said.
But she said there was also the possibility that more homes in the area could regain power. After the 28 homes are restored, that still leaves more than 250 without power.
“We will be assessing future restorations where possible,” Ornelas said.
Ornelas said she wasn’t aware of any plans by the utility company to compensate residents for the weeks-long shutoffs or for any alternative power systems they may have installed in the meantime. Many residents have spent thousands on solar power systems — some still under construction — to remain in their homes without electricity.
Southern California Gas Co. does not have plans to reinstate gas service homes on the peninsula that have been without the service. More than 220 homes have had their service indefinitely cut off, some since July. Many are the same homes that lost electricity.
“Unfortunately, we do not know when it will be safe to restore service in these areas but will continue to evaluate our ability to serve impacted homes,” Brian Haas, spokesperson for SoCalGas, said in a statement.
He said the company continued to coordinate with city officials, public safety agencies and others responding to the ongoing land movement.
Mike Hong, a Portuguese Bend resident who has been living without electricity for almost two months, owns one of the homes that will be getting power back starting Friday. When he received the call from Edison, Hong said, it felt unreal, and although he feels jubilant from the news, he does feel guilty about neighbors who aren’t getting power back.
“We get together every Sunday and talk about the issues and try to help each other,” he said. “There’s a great sense of community here,” he said of those in his homeowners’ association.
Hong credits the re-energizing effort by Edison to the city.
The Rancho Palos Verdes City Council this week called on utilities to figure out what movement would be considered manageable to restore service, especially given that conditions in the area had — for the first time in months — started to dramatically improve.
In the last few weeks, the city installed six deep wells near the coastline to pump out groundwater — the impetus for landslide movement — which, combined have been pumping out 550 gallons per minute, the report said. Geologists this month found that the rate of movement was decreasing fastest around the new wells, according to the city’s latest staff report.
The most dramatic improvement was from a rate of 9 inches a week on Sept. 4 down to 1.5 inches a week as of Oct. 7, the report found. The locations that saw the most dramatic slowdowns were closer to the toe of the Portuguese Bend landslide, near Klondike Canyon.
The rate of land movement decelerated as much as 80% as of early October compared with the month prior at several monitoring sites, the report said. In other locations farther from the new wells, the movement rates saw decreases of about 30% to 50%.
“With this new data from geologists, [the city] felt they could maybe talk to Edison and see if they could bring [utilities] back, and they actually came through,” Hong said, “so I’m very grateful for the city manager and city staff.”
He said even though his home had suffered some damage from the landslide, he feels upbeat.
“We feel very hopeful that things are moving in the right direction,” Hong said.
