Slide Closes Coast Highway, Hurts 2

A landslide swept a sheet of tumbling earth and rocks down the side of a cliff Tuesday in Pacific Palisades, injuring two drivers on the Pacific Coast Highway and leaving a pile of debris that closed the coastal artery.

Geologists with the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety blamed water seepage from a natural spring beneath a mansion 150 feet above the highway for destabilizing the side of the bluff. The officials said that a 20-yard slice of the cliff may have to be removed to prevent further erosion.

A section of the highway from Temescal Canyon Road to West Channel Road was closed to traffic shortly after 11 a.m. Tuesday, and Caltrans officials said they were not certain when the road would reopen.

The California Highway Patrol placed the time at noon today, while one Caltrans official at the scene was optimistic that it would be ready for traffic by the late-afternoon commute.

As Caltrans road crews used bulldozers to shovel out silt and rocks that had piled six feet deep on the highway, officials expressed concern that the collapse of the hillside could bring more slides in the immediate future.

“I think the slope is in danger of additional failure,” said Richard Hazen, a private geologist under contract with the city, as he surveyed the damage.

But geologists said that the homes in the area--most valued at more than $1 million--were not in imminent danger of being damaged by future slides.

The most immediate effect appeared to be on traffic in the area.

Caltrans spokeswoman Margie Tiritilli said that the closed area of PCH, which handles 6,600 vehicles during peak hours daily, will not be reopened until geologists’ reports are completed.

“We don’t know what the duration of the closure will be. We can’t say at this point,” she said.

It also was not immediately clear who will foot the bill for the cleanup and the work that will follow.

Lifeguards and firefighters who arrived at the slide found two cars nearly buried. Phil Topar, a senior Los Angeles County lifeguard, witnessed the slide from his seaside station, then ran to a spot where the cliff had caved in.

“We just saw a very brown dust cloud around 11 o’clock,” Topar said.

Despite heavy traffic on the roadway, only two motorists required hospital treatment.

Barbara Sue Phillips, 47, of Santa Ana was treated at Santa Monica Hospital for two broken ribs, cuts and bruises but was released late in the day, a hospital spokesman said. Edwin R. Withers, also 47, of Thousand Oaks was treated briefly at the hospital for cuts and bruises and discharged, the spokesman said.

According to statements filed with Los Angeles police, Phillips and Withers said they were struck almost simultaneously by the falling debris. Phillips told police that she lost control of her Mercedes sedan as she was driving north on the highway.

“Dirt landed on my windshield and broke it,” she told police. “It pushed me to the left and turned me over.”

When she swerved, Withers, driving in a sports utility truck behind her, also was forced to veer. “I swerved to the left and . . . Pow! It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Withers said.

Ahead of them, a Jeep Wagoneer also was nearly buried by the slide. Kathy Keating, a Pacific Palisades resident, and a friend from New Jersey, Judy Lester, sat helplessly as mud poured over them.

“It was like being in a bumper car at the pier,” Lester said. “All of a sudden it became dark, and mud started coming in the back window.”

Afterward, city geologists who drove to the slide area immediately pinpointed the cause--a darkened gash about 75 feet up the cliff. The spot, they said, indicated that a section of the cliff had been weakened by water collecting from what appeared to be an underground spring.

“The water may have been stopped by some geological condition,” said Hazen, a geologist with Kovacs-Byer Geology Inc. “This may have loosened the soil” and caused the slide, he said.

Geologists said that the back yard of only one home above the slide area appeared to be damaged by the earth movement. When officials went to the residence, a sprawling two-story estate in the 15000 block of Corona del Mar Avenue, they were briefly prevented by one of the homeowners from inspecting the damage.

After obtaining a Building and Safety order compelling the owners to allow them onto the property, geologists and City Councilman Marvin Braude surveyed the weakened cliff. Braude said that the owners probably would be required to remove “the part that is threatening to fall down on the coast highway.”

Both Braude and Palisades residents said Tuesday that the neighborhood, not far from Potrero Canyon, has been plagued by landslides for years.

“It’s been a tremendous problem for a very long time,” said Randy Young, president of the Pacific Palisades Historical Society, who dated slides to the 1930s, when the highway was widened and road crews removed earth that had acted as a natural foundation for the cliff above.

Last July, seven former Potrero Canyon residents whose homes were damaged in a 1978 landslide won $25 million in punitive damages and $1.8 million in compensatory damages in a case against an insurer. The residents claimed that the area’s drainage system was negligently designed and maintained by the city and that runoff from construction in the area had undermined the canyon.

Many of the homes above the site of Tuesday’s landslide are large, two-story structures built in the 1930s and 1940s. They range in value from $1 million to $4 million, said Mary Ann Saxon, a real estate agent.

According to Braude, the edge of the homes must be kept at least 100 feet from the cliff’s edge.

Braude and City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said that Tuesday’s slide “vindicates” their successful 1988 political campaign to prohibit Occidental Petroleum Corp. from drilling at a site about one-quarter of a mile from the slide area. That year, Los Angeles voters passed a proposition banning drilling in the area.

“It vindicates . . . what we expressed about the danger to life,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s a very unstable area.”

In response, a member of the firm’s board of directors called the council members’ statements “a disgrace” and said that no activity had taken place at the proposed drilling site for more than a year.

“The slide occurred more than a quarter of a mile from Occidental’s property and obviously is not related to Occidental in any way,” said Arthur Groman. He added that the firm had been using a “dewatering system” to stabilize “city-owned bluffs behind Occidental’s property.”

Times staff writers Clay Evans, John Kendall, Maria Newman, Jane Fritsch, David Ferrell and Louis Sahagun contributed to this story.