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Full coverage: Rolling Hills Estates landslide damages homes, forces evacuations

Homes severely damaged by a landslide along Peartree Lane in Rolling Hills Estates.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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The Rolling Hills Estates City Council has declared a local state of emergency in the wake of Saturday’s landslide that sent multiple hillside houses on a slow-motion downward slide, collapsing roofs and cracking walls along the way.

Officials still don’t know what caused the clear-day landslide, which has forced the evacuation of 17 homes, many now completely lost. At least 16 people have been displaced, as the land has continued to shift for days, officials said.

Although this landslide came as a shock to residents, the Palos Verdes Peninsula is known to be prone to such movement.

Not far from Peartree Lane, where the homes slid along the hillside, a slow-moving slide, triggered in 1956, continues to shift land in the Portuguese Bend area. In the late 1990s, another landslide collapsed a hilltop office park in Rolling Hills Estates.

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