The conclusion

The nine eras, one paragraph

For seven thousand years people have lived at this cove. For a hundred and forty years the land under our feet has been called Lot H of the Rancho Los Palos Verdes. For a hundred and three years the covenants that govern it have been written by one corporation, its successors, and the community it left behind. For seventy years a landslide has been moving under the bluffs, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, always in the direction of the ocean. And for eighty years people have been trying to build on land that, every time they try, turns out to be the wrong land to build on.

This paper is the tenth of ten in a sequence. The first nine eras trace how we got here. This one is about what we think is happening right now on one small corner of all of that.

The short version

Two adjoining parcels on the inland edge of Abalone Cove — one vacant lot at 0 Clipper Road (the developer is calling it "Site 16"), and one 1.20-acre slice of Shoreline Park next door — appear to share more than a property line. They appear to share a 24-inch-diameter underground line. The line appears to follow the alignment of a Palos Verdes coast road that was platted in the 1920s and paved over or abandoned sometime around or after 1956, when the Portuguese Bend landslide began moving. Nobody we have been able to ask — not the city, not the sanitation district, not the redevelopment agency's successor — has been able to tell us who owns the line, who maintains it, or whether it still carries water.

If the line is maintained and dry, this is a non-story and we will say so. If the line is unmaintained and still carries water — even a little — it may be continuously leaking into a landslide that the city's own engineers say is driven by groundwater. That matters for two reasons. First, it would explain, in part, why the Abalone Cove landslide has never stopped moving. Second, it would mean that a line nobody knows about is doing, quietly and for decades, exactly what the 1979 Stone & Associates report warned against: adding water to a formation that is controlled by water.

Why this is worth finding out

The City of Rancho Palos Verdes has, over the last decade, rezoned the parcel at 0 Clipper Road to allow up to 22 residential units per acre, approved a Housing Element placing 16 units of new housing on the lot, and, in parallel, made the Portuguese Bend landslide moratorium permanent in August 2025. Each of those decisions is legally separable from the others. Each was made in a different room with a different procedure.

What none of those decisions appears to have considered is what is already underground. A line of unknown disposition, in a landslide zone the city's own 2018 EIR calls groundwater-driven, is the kind of thing that should be identified and inspected before more decisions stack up on top of it. Not because the line is definitely the explanation for the landslide — it is not the only possible explanation, and it may not be an explanation at all — but because finding out is cheap and not finding out is expensive.

What we are asking for

We are asking the City of Rancho Palos Verdes, the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, and any other agency that could plausibly hold a record of this line to do four things:

1. Tell the public who owns the line. Or put in writing that no agency records ownership.
2. Produce the inspection history. If there is one, share it. If there isn't one, say so.
3. Do an inspection. A CCTV camera run, or a dye-trace study, or both. These are standard tools; they are not expensive.
4. Share the results publicly. With the California Coastal Commission and with the state's Department of Housing and Community Development, before the next entitlement step on Site 16.

We are not asking for a halt to development. We are asking that the city apply the same reasoning to this line that it applies to everything else in the landslide zone: if groundwater is the controlling factor, an unidentified water-bearing line is worth looking at.

What you can do

If you have personally seen the line — an above-ground vent, a manhole, a piece of the grading that looks like it's covering a pipe — or if you remember a conversation about it, or if you hold a document nobody else does, we want to know.

The contribute page has an anonymous form. No cookies, no analytics, no IP logs. Two editors read every submission. Unverified submissions are not published. If the information you share names someone, the person named gets a chance to respond before anything goes up. The policy is spelled out on the how-it-works page.

If you are a property owner who does not want to be identified and you have documentary evidence, there is a category for that. If you are a former City or County staff member, there is a category for that too. If you are an engineer who looked at this corridor twenty years ago and moved on, we are especially interested in talking to you.

The Foundation has drafted two CPRA (public records act) request templates — one to the LA County Recorder for the Book 6059 page 178 right-of-way, one to the Sanitation Districts for the maintenance status of the line. The templates are ready to send. If you have standing to file and want to pick one up, we can make that easy.

The long view

This cove has been inhabited for about seven thousand years. It will be here long after this Foundation, this website, the current owners of 0 Clipper Road, and this generation of the City Council are all gone. The question on the table is whether, in the handful of years we have together, we are careful enough to find out what is underneath it before we build more on top of it.

We think it is worth finding out. The hypothesis is posted. The investigation is open.