As the latest rain storms saturated the region, officials were keeping a watchful eye on landslide areas in San Clemente and Newport Beach, where recent hillside collapses prompted the evacuation of homes and apartment buildings.
In San Clemente, heavy rain during the morning Tuesday caused a few more feet of debris to fall, but no structural movement was detected as of the afternoon between storms, said Mayor Chris Duncan.
Four apartment buildings, with about 20 units between them, were red-tagged last week when concrete decks and the hillside collapsed down the bluff and onto the popular beach trail in North Beach.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, but it’s good that we didn’t have any other structures failing,” Duncan said Tuesday afternoon.
City engineers were onsite monitoring through the storm and property owners are starting to bring in their own geo-technical engineers for evaluations, Duncan said. “We will keep it red-tagged for safety, it’s up to the property owners to come and clear the building.”
There’s a chance, he said, the buildings were not compromised in the landslide and the damage was just on the deck areas.
“That’s what we’re hoping for,” he said. “If their experts are able to demonstrate the structures are safe, that will be a benefit for their owners, who I’m sure have been concerned their entire property could be lost.”
Beyond some emergency resources, Duncan said after researching what assistance might be available from city, county, state and federal resources, there wasn’t really financial help the government could offer renters with finding short-term solutions because doing so would be considered a gift of public funds for people’s living expenses, Duncan said.
“We’re doing everything we can to bridge this gap and making connections to resources,” he said. “We hope, with any luck, we can get many of them into their residences and homes so they can get to some sort of normalcy.”
Duncan…
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