People and Events

It’s been a couple of months since workers peeled away a large black plastic sheet to begin removing the dirt at the site of a 1986 Torrance landslide. The slippage on the hillside south of Pacific Coast Highway destroyed two expensive homes and damaged others.

This phase of the $5.2-million, seven-month repair project entails replacing the unstable earth between Via Corona and Vista Largo with more cohesive soil.

And where does one find 100,000 cubic yards of stable dirt?

At Portuguese Bend, where the dirt must be moved out to slow a slide that has been going on for more than 30 years and has crunched scores of homes. The Portuguese Bend march to the ocean has at least been slowed radically by shifting dirt around--or moving it out.

Some of it will now be shifted to Torrance because the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council, sitting as the city’s redevelopment agency, approved an agreement with South Bay Engineering Co. to do the job.

“We were going to have to get the dirt somewhere,” said Torrance City Engineer Richard Burtt. “It’s fortunate we could get it from a neighboring city.”

Asked to explain how dirt from one slide area could be more cohesive than dirt from another, engineer Ross Bolton of South Bay Engineering said: “It’s real technical, but yes, it’s better dirt. It has greater strength. And in the process, we’ll be compacting it and watering it.”

The recent report here that a live starfish was found wandering around Lookout Mountain Avenue up in Laurel Canyon prompted teacher Carol Coordt to ask for possible explanations from her 5-year-old pre-elementary students at Pacific School in Manhattan Beach.

Some replies:

Eric Susoeff: “Someone probably put it there or probably a bird picked it up and dropped it down.”

Patrick O’Neal: “Maybe he could have walked a half a mile a day and got there. They don’t walk too fast, you know.”

Tim McBride: “He might have been a good walker.”

Jessica Gresko: “It must be a joke.”

Others in the class, says teacher Coordt, “thought it was pretty logical that a starfish could just go anywhere it wanted. After all, a starfish can open a clamshell ‘and get pearls and stuff,’ so why can’t he walk anywhere he wants?”

“So much,” observes Coordt, “for what I’ve taught them about ocean life.”

More mystery posters:

Neither Caltrans nor the CHP has any idea who has been plastering freeway on-ramp signal control boxes in Santa Monica and other Westside communities with posters showing a happy-faced, cursive stick figure that has no apparent political philosophy or product to sell.

Unlike the work of artist Robbie Conal, who gained some attention by papering the town with posters that took satirical shots at Ollie North, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Jim and Tammy Bakker (“False Profit”) and others, these posters do not seem intended to do anything but cheer up motorists.

“The guy called me once,” Conal recalls. “Probably to talk posters. But I never called him back.” Conal could remember only that the caller’s name was “Michael.”

The figure apparently began appearing about last December, when the posters read “Seasons Greetings,” and are still popping up to say nothing more sinister or meaningful than “Ta Daa.”

“I’ve seen ‘em all over the place,” said California Highway Patrolman D.M. Stricklin in West Los Angeles. “I don’t know whether someone is playing games or what.”

State Department of Transportation spokesman Presley Burroughs said: “It’s not Caltrans. And no one else would have any authority to do that.”

A new post office is opening in Canoga Park next Monday, postal officials announced.

But they got the address wrong.

They quickly caught their error and telephoned recipients of the press release to inform them that the branch will be at 8221 Canoga Ave., not 8201 Canoga Ave.

Pretty close. Same block. The mail would have probably got there all right.