This week residents in the Portuguese Bend community of the City of Rancho Palos Verdes had to deal with not only the loss of natural gas utilities but electric service as well.

On July 30 the City released an update stating, “This evening [Tuesday] Southern California Edison (SCE) issued a notification to customers in the landslide area to advise that Southern California Edison’s service to [their] property may be discontinued if conditions warrant.”

It continued to state that the City continued communication with SCE to get advanced notice of any “de-energization” in the landslide area.

“Potential utility shutoffs would impact not only residents but also City services. We are making every effort to be prepared for a range of scenarios, and you should, too,” the statement continued.

Around 2013 a publication was released by Robert Douglas titled “The CREEPY (Slow Moving) Landslides of the Portuguese Bend Area.” This publication spoke of the landslide at the time and warned of similar future events.

According to terranealife.com, this area of Rancho Palos Verdes experienced a major landslide in the 1950s that was triggered by nearby roadwork. Since then the “land has moved more than 400 feet and continues to creep toward the ocean today, requiring constant repair and maintenance.”

On June 24, LAist reported that the massive landslide is moving at a rate of one foot a week. This landslide was made worse by the last two years of heavy rains.

The Palos Verdes Peninsula is landslide prone, in part because of a thick layer of volcanic ash that’s morphed into impermeable clay, called bentonite, over millennia. The clay keeps water from draining through the steep hillsides and can easily give out when wet, according to LAist.com.

“With land moving one foot each week, Rancho Palos Verdes takes big steps to try to slow a dangerous landslide,” reads laist.com.

Building in areas with historic landslides or in wildland-urban interface, areas where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildlife vegetation, is something that city planners need to review more closely especially with climate change.

Areas that might never have flooded or only experienced 500-year flooding are now experiencing, sometimes, annually flooding.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of Florida the land surface is also sinking.

“If the oceans and atmosphere continue to warm, sea level along the Florida coast is likely to rise one to four feet in the next century. Rising sea levels submerge wetlands and dry land, erode beaches and exacerbate coastal flooding,” according to the EPA.

We may not be at the point where Snake Plissken (“Escape from LA”) will surf down the streets of LA, but we have to be ready for that extreme weather. And being ready means getting our homes in order and no longer just hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.

There are some who are working toward building structures that will survive our present climate change. A Texas company called Icon is using 3D printers to create houses that, it says, will survive fires and hurricane-force winds. The buildings are made of concrete.

And so this is what we will be seeing more of in the future and what we as humans do best: when a challenge is presented we spend a lot of time creating technology to get around the problem, which will give us temporary relief; however, in the case of climate change we will need more than just a workaround.

For our weather, we will still be seeing above normal temperatures of low to mid-90s for Thursday through Tuesday. There is a 20% chance of thunderstorms from Thursday night into Friday afternoon with gusty winds of 45 to 60 mph.

According to NOAA, predicting where these thunderstorms will strike is not easy. They could be in Altadena and not reach the Crescenta Valley, or in CV and not in Tujunga.

These storms and winds are dangerous regarding wildfires because if there is no rain but only lightning, a fire can start.