Landslide reduces LA home to rubble and leaves two other houses on edge
A landslide in a wealthy neighborhood reduced a Los Angeles house under renovation to a jumble of lumber, pulled the pool and deck away from a second home, and left the pool at a third residence on the edge of a huge fissure early Wednesday.
The slide occurred just before 3am in Sherman Oaks, a neighborhood of expensive homes about 12 miles (19km) north-west of downtown. An initial search found no victims, but several people were evacuated from one house, the Los Angeles fire department said in a statement.
There was no immediate word on the cause of the landslide, but numerous slides have happened in southern California due to drenching winter storms that saturated the ground. During heavy rains in early February, mudslides damaged homes in the Beverly Crest neighborhood of Los Angeles, leaving several cars buried in mud and a grand piano resting in the wreckage.
Since 1 January, downtown LA has had almost 16in (41cm) of rain, which is nearly twice what it normally gets by this time of the year. By early February, the city had reported nearly 600 mudslides, had red-tagged 16 buildings as unsafe to enter and had yellow-tagged more than 30 others, limiting access to them.
The Los Angeles fire department captain Cody Weireter told KTLA5 News that officials were still evaluating whether other homes in the neighborhood might also be in danger from landslides.
“Obviously, the risk is there … We’re at a static situation where it’s not really moving at this point,” Weireter said.
News helicopter video revealed the extent of the slide. The destroyed house, which appeared to be in the midst of a renovation, was crushed with most of its roof lying on the ground. Next door, the slide had pulled a pool and deck area away from a house.
Up the hill, the slide left a tennis court and pool on the edge of a gaping fissure. A table and chairs that once stood poolside were on a patch of deck on the other side of the fissure. Firefighters drained the pool to reduce weight on the hill.
Some rain could return this weekend, the National Weather Service said.