Landslides Force Power Outages in California
Image courtesy of Mark Stephenson under Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
A series of devastating landslides in Los Angeles County, California, have put hundreds of structures at risk of destruction, including multimillion-dollar homes in the Southern California city of Rancho Palos Verdes (about 30 miles south of Los Angeles). This has forced the local electric utility, Southern California Edison (SCE), to make some hard forced-outage decisions. The summer of 2024 will not be remembered fondly by the locals, that’s for sure.
Why the California Landslides Required Drastic Action
SCE found itself between a rock and a hard place. The landslide zone currently encapsulates a whopping 680 acres, and has continued to slowly expand over time – we’re talking decades! It’s one of the largest active landslides in the U.S., and it has actually moved homes by hundreds of feet over the years. In addition, it has required Rancho Palos Verdes to spend approximately $1 million a year to fix a major roadway that continuously degrades due to the shifting of the land.
And unfortunately, according to one local official, the land is becoming increasingly unstable as time goes on. In fact, the land shifting has drastically accelerated over the past year due to an excessive amount of rainfall that occurred in spring 2023. Some parts of the local area are now moving up to 10 inches a week.
This instability creates an elevated wildfire risk and puts the infrastructure in harm?s way. Making matters worse is that some residents of the wealthy communities at risk are refusing to evacuate. While, as of the time of this writing, evacuations are voluntary, the mere presence of local residents potentially makes the impact of the landslides exponentially worse.
Therefore, SCE did what the company had to do – it cut power to 140 homes on 9/1/24 and another 105 on 9/2/24. Of note is that the local gas and water providers also cut service to the at-risk homes.
Thankfully, most of us do not need to respond to and recover from landslides. As for SCE, it did what it had to do.
