Along the sparkling coast of Southern California, a string of landslides creeping toward the sea has transformed the wealthy community of Rancho Palos Verdes into a disaster zone.
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New data from a NASA plane shows the widening threat of these slow-moving landslides, which have destabilized homes, businesses, and infrastructure like roads and utilities. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory documented how the landslides have pushed westward, almost doubling in area since the state mapped them in 2007.
The landslides have also sped up in recent years. A month of aerial radar images taken by NASA in the fall revealed how land in the Palos Verdes Peninsula slid toward the ocean by as much as four inches each week between mid-September and mid-October. Before that, a city report showed more than a foot of weekly movement in July and August.
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Present boundary includes areas where landslides moved faster than one centimeter per week between Sept. 18 and Oct. 17, 2024.
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The mass of slides in Los Angeles County, known as the Greater Portuguese Bend Landslide Complex, reactivated in 1956 after road construction destabilized the once-dormant slope. For decades, it slid just a few inches every year. But heavy rain in 2023 and early 2024 accelerated that movement, leading Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency, citing “conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property.”
Homes in Rancho Palos Verdes began collapsing in June and August of 2023. Streets have fissured. Walls have shifted and floors have cracked open to reveal the dynamic earth below. A downed power line related to the slides started a small brush fire in August. A $42 million buyout program helps property owners voluntarily sell and relocate, but homeowner insurance policies do not typically cover landslides.
A stretch of coastline where landslides meet the beach in Rancho Palos Verdes.
Loren Elliott for The New York Times
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Damage in a residential area of Rancho Palos Verdes in August.
Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Mitigating such a disaster is extremely expensive. By the end of this fiscal year, the city said it will have spent more than $35 million, almost 90 percent of its general fund operations budget, on addressing the landslide. That includes the installation of 11 wells that have worked to pump out 145 million gallons of groundwater that could further destabilize the slope. The investment has yielded results: The landslide slowed by about 3 percent on average between December and February thanks to the wells and a lack of rain, the city said.
Slow-moving slides are common around the world, and especially in California, where several hundred have been mapped in coastal mountain ranges. Normally moving at a sluggish pace, these slides can grind nearly to a halt during the dry summer months before a wet winter makes them crawl again.
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But last summer, the landslide complex in Rancho Palos Verdes exhibited strange behavior when it failed to slow. The best guess for why has to do with a very wet 2023, said Alexander Handwerger, a research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has studied the behavior of slow-moving landslides for well over a decade. Typically triggered tens of meters underground, they remain an ongoing area of research.
“Of all the things we know,” Dr. Handwerger said, “we know the least about what’s happening under the ground.”
Last week, other parts of Los Angeles County faced additional landslides, ones that move quickly, running at meters per second instead of centimeters per week. The National Weather Service in Los Angeles issued warnings for post-fire debris flows — a tangle of mud, rocks and trees that start on burn scars — ahead of heavy rainfall on Thursday. Los Angeles neighborhoods scorched by wildfires like the Eaton and Palisades fires last month faced some of the greatest dangers as those flows hit business and homes in Southern California.
But slower-moving landslides, like the ones in Rancho Palos Verdes, are more predictable. They ooze rather than race. They typically need a season of rain, rather than a single storm, to accelerate. And it’s extremely rare for them to suddenly collapse or slide in a catastrophic way.
It’s unclear what triggers that kind of sudden catastrophe, said Luke McGuire, an associate professor in geomorphology at the University of Arizona. He pointed to one of the few known examples of such an event, in 2017, when the Mud Creek Landslide in Big Sur gave way after eight years of stable sliding. More than 65 feet of rocks and dirt covered a quarter-mile of Highway 1, the scenic drive winding along the California coast.
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Experts say that the city of Rancho Palos Verdes probably will not experience that kind of sudden event. “You can never say never, but the likelihood that this would go into a catastrophic movement phase is quite low,” said Dave Petley, a landslide expert who collects global landslide data for the American Geophysical Union. “It’s likely it’ll continue to cause substantial property damage, but the risk of the thing suddenly sliding into the sea and taking everyone with it is not particularly high.”
A 2019 Nature study by Dr. Handwerger showed that the Mud Creek Landslide could have been triggered by a shift from drought to record rainfall. In a warming world, an increase in extreme rain events could cause more landslides to quicken, according to the study.
More precipitation could also cause more landslides to emerge from hibernation into slow-moving slides.
“Rainfall under climate change can wake a landslide back up,” Dr. Petley said, adding that a vast number of dormant landslides with this potential exist across the globe.
When Rickey Spivey Towner had a heart attack in his Coachella Valley home last September, his stepdaughter Megan Conner found him unconscious and called 911.
But there was a problem: The equipment used to answer 911 calls at the Desert Hot Springs Police Department malfunctioned and Conner couldn’t connect with a dispatcher for more than two minutes, according to dispatch records obtained by NBC Bay Area.
In a recording of one of Conner’s 911 calls, the dispatcher is immediately disconnected, and Conner is met by silence for 25 seconds until the dispatcher can get back on the line.
Towner did not survive. His family said he died of a heart attack.
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Ricky Spivey Towner’s death is the first documented fatality that may be linked to Cal OES’ problematic 911 upgrade.
Towner’s death may be the first documented fatality potentially linked to the state’s ongoing 911 system overhaul.
Newly obtained records under the California Public Records Act reveal the connection problems were linked to call processing equipment approved by the state as part of California’s troubled Next Generation 911 rollout, sold by a state contractor called NGA 911, and deployed by the Desert Hot Springs Police Department in 2023.
Police records reveal emergency dispatchers were unexpectedly logged out of their phone system as Conner called 911 to report her stepfather lying unresponsive on the floor.
Records obtained by NBC Bay Area show all of the dispatchers were logged out of their systems when the 911 call came in.
It’s unclear if Towner could have been saved had his stepdaughter been able to summon help faster, but records show a police dispatch manager sent a scathing email shortly after his death to NGA 911. She also copied top officials with the California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES).
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“People’s lives are on the line and your failed system may have just cost this person their life,” the dispatch manager wrote on September 12, 2025. “I believe that your engineers are continuously making changes to our live environment which is affecting our user experience. Which again is unacceptable, especially when I had continuously asked you to stop.”
Desert Hot Springs dispatch manager’s email to NGA 911 and Cal OES shortly after Towner’s death.
Records from the police department lay out the details of what went wrong and show Conner had to call 911 three times that morning before she was finally able to relay any information to a dispatcher. It took nearly two-and-a-half minutes.
The national standard calls for 90% of 911 calls to be answered within 15 seconds.
The equipment that failed is called call processing equipment (CPE) and it was purchased by Desert Hot Springs police after Cal OES suspended new sales of existing call processing equipment and began pushing dispatch centers toward cloud-based systems designed for the state’s Next Generation 911 network.
State officials say the Next Generation 911 project is a critical upgrade to California’s antiquated 911 system and will improve emergency response.
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After a series of reports by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit, however, the overhaul has faced mounting scrutiny from lawmakers over delays, technical problems and a rising price tag exceeding $450 million.
WATCH NBC BAY AREA’S INVESTIGATIONS CA 911: TOO BIG TO FAIL
Like most emergency dispatch centers across California, Desert Hot Springs has not switched over to the new Next Gen 911 network. However, it was among the first to use the new cloud-based CPE that Cal OES promoted after suspending sales of legacy call processing equipment that failed to meet Next Generation 911 standards.
NGA 911’s equipment had passed state lab testing conducted by Cal OES and was among a handful of vendors approved to sell the new cloud-based CPE when Desert Hot Springs purchased its equipment.
While Cal OES, NGA 911, and Desert Hot Springs police were discussing the equipment failure during Conner’s 911 call, the family says they were left in the dark. They say nobody had told them about what happened until they were recently contacted by NBC Bay Area.
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“Why didn’t I know any of this,” said Lakisha Romero, Towner’s daughter. “My dad has been talked about around the state and I had no clue what was going on.”
Lakisha Romero (left) and Megan Conner (right).
A timeline of “major events and challenges” in the state’s implementation of Next Gen 911 that has since been posted on Cal OES’ website shows the CPE purchased by Desert Hot Springs had been plagued by persistent problems since it was first deployed more than two years before Towner’s death.
“911 calls that were disconnected before being answered by the [911 center] are not displaying for dispatchers,” the Cal OES timeline states. “A workaround was immediately implemented that required dispatchers to use third party technology. NGA 911, LLC is notified of the problem and indicates it is working on a solution.”
About a year later, the Wasco Police Department also purchased NGA 911 call processing equipment and experienced “the same problems as [Desert Hot Springs],” according to Cal OES.
By May 2025, police in Desert Hot Springs and Wasco had opened roughly 300 trouble tickets concerning issues with NGA 911’s CPE, including 17 of “critical importance” and 99 of “high importance.” Two months later, both departments canceled their CPE orders with NGA 911.
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In a statement, the Desert Hot Springs Police Department said it “worked collaboratively with NGA and Cal OES regarding operational and technical concerns that arose during implementation and operation.”
Cal OES said it took “immediate steps” to help both departments swap out the problematic CPE with equipment from a new vendor, but the process took months to complete and had not occurred before Towner died.
Three weeks after his death, Cal OES said it removed NGA 911 from the approved CPE vendor list and the agency eventually cancelled the company’s CPE contract in March of this year.
Cal OES declined an on-camera interview request but said in an email the agency is committed to oversight and accountability of its contractors.
NGA has not responded to NBC Bay Area’s repeated requests for comment regarding Towner’s death and the equipment failure in Desert Hot Springs. It has posted this timeline on its website explaining its project record in California.
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California’s Next Generation 911 project is years behind schedule, but state officials say there’s a new plan in place to get the project moving forward again and hope to have the Los Angeles region hooked up to the network in time for the 2028 Olympics.
The state agency recently requested another $142 million to meet that goal, which would be paid for by an additional 13 cent surcharge on the phone bill of Californians.
As the state moves forward with Next Generation 911 and upgraded call processing equipment that 911 centers desperately need, Towner’s family continues to seek answers.
Romero visited the Desert Hot Springs Police Department in May to get some clarity about what happened in her father’s case but said she was disappointed by the response.
Lakisha Romero is still searching for answers about what went wrong.
“I went asking for answers and nobody wanted to tell me anything,” Romero said.
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In a statement, the department said it’s “committed to transparency and reliable emergency response services.”
Towner’s family said nobody has contacted them about the long history of problems associated with the 911 equipment and questioned why it wasn’t removed a long time ago.
“Why should it take someone dying for them to do that,” Romero asked.
Candice Nguyen is the reporter on this story. If you have a comment or a question, email her at candice.nguyen@nbcuni.com.
HUMBOLDT, Calif. — As Northern California’s recreational salmon season ramps up, the U.S. Coast Guard says they are increasing patrols to help keep anglers safe and ensure boaters are following federal and state safety regulations.
This marks the second recreational salmon season after several years of closures, bringing more boat traffic to the water as anglers head out in search of salmon. The Coast Guard says their focus during the busy season will be less about fishing violations and more about making sure boaters are prepared before leaving the dock.
“The majority of the violations that we see on the wreck side from the Coast Guard standpoint typically are safety here,” said Lieutenant Junior Grade Amanda Bourgeois with the U.S. Coast Guard. “So, less living marine resources and more safety recreational. So you’re looking at like fire extinguishers, flares, personal flotation devices, that kind of thing.”
According to Humboldt Bay Surface Operations Chief Scott Bock, some of the biggest violations seen during Northern California’s salmon season involve missing required safety gear and paperwork.
“It is imperative that boaters carry the required safety equipment per state and federal law,” Bock said in an emailed statement. “As a reminder, children under 13 are required to wear a lifejacket all times, above decks, on a moving vessel.”
Bock said officers also regularly encounter boaters without vessel documentation and registration paperwork onboard.
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“It is also important that boaters carry their vessel’s documentation and registration paperwork onboard, similar to what you carry in your vehicle,” Bock said. “Last year, we saw numerous boats that did not have that paperwork onboard.”
The Coast Guard says the most common citations involve not carrying required safety equipment for the size of the vessel or the number of people onboard.
“Not carrying the required safety equipment, including lifejackets, fire extinguishers, and flares for the size of vessel and number of people onboard,” Bock said.
Bourgeois said the Coast Guard often works alongside California Department of Fish and Wildlife during enforcement operations, particularly when it comes to fishing regulations and living marine resource violations.
As for catch limits, Bock said the current recreational limit remains two salmon per person per day with a minimum size requirement of 20 inches. However, he said anglers should continue checking with California Fish and Wildlife throughout the season, as regulations can change.
While California Fish and Wildlife manages state waters within three nautical miles of shore, Bock said federal regulations take over farther offshore, though recreational limits currently mirror state rules.
Before heading out, Coast Guard officials are also encouraging boaters to check weather and ocean conditions, follow safety regulations and make smart decisions on the water.
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“Our pitch in the Coast Guard is always please be safe, follow the recreational and commercial safety regulations, be smart about being out there, check the weather, and as always follow all laws and regulations,” Bourgeois said.
A showdown between Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer in the California governor’s race would have made climate policy one of the most talked-about issues through November.
Now, environmental advocates are preparing for their work to fade into the background.
Steyer, the billionaire climate activist who ran as a progressive, finished third in the primary behind Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton, the Trump-backed political commentator. His loss ended a campaign that spent millions on ads attacking Becerra for accepting oil industry money and promising to break up power companies.
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“I’m proud of the enemies we made,” Steyer said in a concession statement Tuesday, singling out energy corporations like Chevron and PG&E that infused millions in independent expenditure committees opposing him.
