Condominium complex owners along Pacifica’s now infamous eroding blufftop on Esplanade Avenue, heeding the lessons of the past, are planning to spend millions of dollars to ensure their backyards won’t fall into the ocean this winter, according to city and state officials.

But the owners of two apartment buildings that were evacuated last winter are no closer to formulating a plan to save them ahead of the rainy season, which officially begins on Oct. 15.

The spectacle of the cliff crumbling inexorably from behind the apartment buildings at 320 and 330 Esplanade Ave. drew wide attention from local and national media attention last December and caused the city of Pacifica to red-tag the dwellings, whose back porches had to be removed to prevent them from falling into the ocean.

Ten months later, the buildings are still vacant. The foundations are still poking over the cliff. And the owners are enveloped in a morass of lawsuits and countersuits with the companies they hired to help stabilize the cliff amid heavy rainfall and to keep the ocean’s destructive waves at bay.

Owners Farshid Samsami and Millard Tong could be tempting fate by delaying a decision on whether to demolish their buildings or to try to build some sort of artificial wall to hold the exposed bluff together for another few years, said city building official Doug Rider.

“The city will step in if it became such an endangered species that it needs to removed from the top of the hill. But that’s a long legal process,” said Rider.

The city would rather the owners pay to demolish the structures themselves, if it comes to that, but they may not have the money. Samsami and Tong have tried to get insurance money to cover their repairs and have also talked about setting up a local tax assessment district to pool resources among building owners affected by erosion, but both efforts seem to have failed.

“There is not much change,” said Samsami. Tong could not be reached for comment.

Money seems to be the main issue now. Two comparatively upscale complexes on the same stretch of roadway, Land’s End and The Bluffs at Pacifica, have already installed a thick retaining wall along the cliff face this summer or have applied for a permit to do so, according to Ruby Pap, district supervisor for the California Coastal Commission.

Samsami obtained an emergency permit from the Coastal Commission in January to install a spray-on concrete wall and horizontal steel “soil nails” to stabilize the cliff, but Samsami stopped the construction work prematurely. The concrete peeled away, taking a few more chunks of soil with it.

In July, the company that installed the soil nails sued Samsami for $373,100 in unpaid bills. Engineered Soil Repairs, Inc., which oversaw the repairs, alleged in a separate lawsuit that Samsami owes them $589,589. In September, Samsami countersued both companies for “negligence” as well as “defective and incomplete work” which caused greater bluff erosion and property damage, according to the suit.

Tong, owner of 320 Esplanade Ave., countersued Engineered Soil Repairs in July in response to a complaint alleging that Tong owes the company $1.8 million for shoreline protection it installed in 2008 and 2009. In his countersuit, Tong says the protection the company installed (4,500 tons of rock riprap at the base of the cliff) was defective.

Pacifica’s bluffs are made up of sandstone and shale and typically erode at an average rate of 1.6 feet per year, but last winter was exceptional, according to local engineers. Some properties lost as much as 20 horizontal feet of bluff.

Rider said it’s up to the homeowners, not the city, to protect their property when the rain comes.

“We’ll just keep our fingers crossed,” he said.

Contact Julia Scott at 650-348-4340.