No Bluffing: It’s Hard Work, but It Has a View

The job may seem monotonous, even boring. Hydraulic excavators, bulldozers and trucks emit the rhythmic hum familiar to construction work as dirt is piled and hauled, piled and hauled.

But for crews laboring 12 hours a day, seven days a week to regrade a landslide-marred hill near Malibu’s Las Flores Canyon Road on Pacific Coast Highway, there is one consolation. “At least the view is nice,” said Bijan Salar, a Caltrans inspector supervising the site Saturday morning.

There is more to the project than meets the eye, Salar said. That monotony is actually a carefully orchestrated procedure.

The workers, about 10 to 13 on any given day, excluding the truck drivers, gather about 6:30 a.m. at the foot of the hill. They go over the work to be done and start at 7. They work through a 12-hour shift without much of a break and eat their lunches in their machines to save time.

Excavators and bulldozers must be synchronized and trucks must maintain a constant pace to avoid bottlenecks. Engineers periodically monitor the hill for movement with “inclinators” buried as deep as 200 feet in the earth.

“People think it’s just taking dirt and dumping it,” Salar said. “It is not that easy.”

El Nino wreaked havoc with the notoriously problematic Malibu section of PCH this year. The hills that flank the curving seaside road are a menacing-looking mix of jagged edges and erosion grooves.

On Thursday, Caltrans placed a 750,000-square-foot cable net to secure another hill just south of the regrading site.

Since June, Caltrans has been working to remove about 300,000 cubic yards of dirt from the bluff next to Las Flores Canyon Road. Two homes above the hill had to be demolished this year because of landslides.

Caltrans spokeswoman Margie Tiritilli said officials hope the $20-million project will be a permanent fix for the area. If stacked up, the debris hauled from the hill would be enough to bury six football fields 4 feet deep. The project is expected to be completed some time later this year, she said.

It is a large undertaking that has forced Caltrans to block two of the four lanes along that section. It is the only area of PCH that remains partially closed since landslides forced several closings during the winter.

Caltrans has contracted with Burns Pacific, a Thousand Oaks-based company that has done several jobs for the agency, to do the work.

About 15 employees are working the site along with 15 to 25 dump truck drivers. The excavator and bulldozer operators work six-day shifts. “It could be worse, they could be working in the desert,” Salar joked. “At least here, it is cooler.”

Still, with about 150,000 cubic yards of clay, silt, sand, gravel and boulders left to be removed, it looks like a long summer ahead. But Burns Pacific Supervisor Orville Bridgeman said he hasn’t received any complaints from the workers.

“Everyone makes a good living, I’m sure,” he said.

Once the 650-foot-long, 225-foot-high bluff is cut to size, crews will begin the work of carving sloping angles onto the hill and planting vegetation to secure the earth. A barrier will be built around a house remaining atop the hill and along the road as a safeguard against future slides. Caltrans has been using 28 concrete-filled cargo containers stacked 16 feet high to serve as a temporary abutment to protect the remaining lanes against wayward debris.

Despite the troubled existence, the seaside hills of Malibu seem to continue to attract fans. Salar said a man came by the construction site earlier Saturday looking for properties for sale. Standing yards away from where houses were demolished, Salar said, the man looked over the sun-drenched ocean and commented: “I’d love to wake up every morning to this view.”

“When you look at the sun and the sea, you forget where you are building the house,” Salar said.