With new money in place — and in a race against the approaching rainy season — city engineers prepped this week to install drains and anchors to San Pedro’s blufftop landslide area.

Many of the nearly 50 community members appointed to a new advisory committee, meanwhile, met for the first time Tuesday night for a briefing on the work ahead.

The White Point Landslide Advisory Committee – appointed by Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino – is asked to make recommendations that will include tackling the thorny issue of whether to pursue rebuilding the collapsed section of Paseo del Mar in the more distant future.

Addressing the new panel, Buscaino said he hoped to have recommendations after about three meetings.

Paseo del Mar is a “regional asset” that has been enjoyed by millions, he said.

Co-chaired by Buscaino’s chief of staff Doane Liu and San Pedro Youth Coalition President Scott Lane, the committee will analyze options, designs, costs and future funding as rehabilitation of the site begins in earnest.

Members include representatives from neighborhood councils, nearby cities, businesses and nonprofit organizations, homeowners’ associations and area lawmakers.

“We’re turning to you for final recommendations,” Buscaino told committee members who heard an update from Los Angeles City Engineer Gary Lee Moore, Deputy Engineer Vince Jones and geologists from Shannon & Wilson Inc., the firm hired by the city of Los Angeles to study the slide in its aftermath.

No further movement has been detected in the area since the Nov. 20 slide, geologists said, but a number of measures planned to add more stability in the future.

Immediate stabilizing plans are slated to cost about $7 million and will include putting in small (6-inch diameter) drains to carry water from the site to the ocean. The presence of underground water has been pinpointed as the primary cause of the road collapse.

Underground steel anchors and braces also will be installed to stabilize the slope and prevent further erosion.

With about $1.5 million already on hand, the Los Angeles City Council last week allocated the additional funding needed for the repairs. The money comes from Special Gas Tax Street Improvement Fund.

Those funds also will be used to reshape the cliff where the landslide occurred along Paseo del Mar between Western and Weymouth avenues. The sheared-off cliff will be reshaped to lessen the chance of more sloughing, and drains will be put into the “valley” slide section below to prevent pooling of rainwater.

The money also will pay for traffic safety instruments to help reroute vehicles away from the closed link of road.

Contractors surveyed the site on Wednesday in preparation to remove concrete and other debris in November and December.

Thirty to 50 dewatering drains will be installed in December and January, with the slope anchors going in from March to June. Traffic turnarounds will be put in next spring also.

The looming question about whether to rebuild the road is unsettled. About 600 feet of the road collapsed in last year’s landslide. It had been closed a few months earlier after city engineers noticed the street buckling, and no one was injured in the slide.

The community seems divided on whether to rebuild Paseo del Mar, with many in the immediate area saying the absence of the heavily traveled road over in the past year has made neighborhoods quieter and safer.

Others believe the stretch of highway, which sits 120 feet above the ocean, provides a critical east-west connection on the south end of town. It’s also been a popular scenic drive for years, with city maps showing that its existence dates back to the early 1920.

The options include:

abandoning the road (no additional costs).

restoring the road in the same location, which would require a complicated soil packing process ($42 million to $50million).

restoring the road in the same location but using a retaining wall below the street on the ocean side ($22 million to $27 million).

building a bridge that would span the slide area ($57million to $62 million).

regrading the roadway, which would result in an uneven surface similar to Portuguese Bend to the west ($4 million to $8 million, but with regular maintenance costs beyond that required).

rerouting the road 170 feet to the north of the crescent-shaped slide area, which would take it inside the White Point Nature Preserve and put it under city Recreation and Parks rules that would require it to be closed from dusk to dawn ($4 million to $8 million).

Pinning down the exact cause of the slide remains elusive, although geologists said the main and final culprit was simply water and gravity.

High levels of underground water were documented by scientists in the early months following the slide.

Peppered with questions by committee members at their first meeting Tuesday, geologists and engineers said they may never know the root cause of the water that caused the land to fall into the ocean.

“What we came away with was that the primary driving force was water,” said Dean Francuch, geologist with Shannon & Wilson Inc.

But, he added, “we don’t know where this water is coming from.”

Irrigation, possible leaky pipes or other sources could not specifically be pinpointed. Underground military silos that were inspected were dry.

“Everything we’ve looked at has been inconclusive,” he said. “There’s no real silver bullet that we’ve been able to find to date.”

Francuch likened the mystery to going to a doctor with an illness that can be diagnosed and treated.

“(But) if you asked `How did I get this?’ nine times out of 10 the doctor would say, We don’t know how you got it. We’re not sure of the source of that water, but we can treat the water.”

donna.littlejohn@dailybreeze.com

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