How an ‘ancient landslide’ keeps threatening a railroad, homes in San Clemente, Calif.
In this 2007 photo taken May 20, the “old landslide” remains active on the San Clemente Creek embankment. (Courtesy of Steve Scholz)
Steve Scholz got his first brush with the San Clemente Creek landslide in 2004, after a friend called him one evening to report an alarming landslide that had appeared on the embankment that runs along the southern end of Ocean Boulevard. It was a small slide with three to five feet of loose, wet sand and gravel, Scholz said.
But then more slides began to appear, and Scholz began to fear something larger and more dangerous.
“My first instinct was to get out of town,” he said.
With his two young children in tow, he set off for the San Diego River to check out a long overdue repair at the town’s wastewater plant. There, he saw a train line in need of repair, and there also was another landslide on the creek — one with more loose sand and gravel and more than 30 feet of it.
Scholz, then a young, part-time city planner, called the county, and they told him to call for help.
On the day after Thanksgiving of that year, the county opened a section of their county highway and put it in service to run a railway. The highway was the first of 11.
The county has never done anything more than keep the traffic moving, from trucks carrying trash to residents driving golf carts to the golf courses. But the landslide and the danger of the slide have continued to grow.
Scholz and his children were evacuated in 2006, when another slide made the creek a 1,200-foot-long canal. They returned in early 2007, after another slide formed a lake on the creek bed.
Now, the landslide is forming a lake more than 7 feet deep and more than 10 feet wide.
Over the past eight years, the amount of loose material moving down the creek has grown, said Mark Johnson, a manager for the Orange County Office of the Natural Resources