Excerpt:
The staircase leans in a disturbing direction. The view out the window is no longer straight to the horizon, and living room chairs almost feel like they’re sliding toward the ocean. But 91-year-old artist Carol Guion wishes to live out her days in her home of 55 years on the San Mateo County coast, in defiance of the earth slowly moving beneath her.
“I can’t leave here,” said Guion, who is in hospice care.
Guion lives in Seal Cove, a picturesque neighborhood of around 170 homes perched on Pillar Point Bluff in Moss Beach, just west of the Half Moon Bay airport. The bluff is an anomaly on the California coast. Its cliffs are crumbling with remarkable speed, as waves erode the loose sediment, and faults run along the coast and through the entire bluff.
“Pillar Point Bluff is pretty special,” said Kim Blisniuk, a professor of geology at San Jose State University who studies it. “It’s unique because it’s an area where we have an active fault and coastal erosion” — right in the middle of a developed community.
Decades ago, homeowners moved or demolished some houses on the cliff when foundations became unstable. The county abandoned part of Ocean Boulevard, which runs right along the cliff, first in 1995 and then again in 2006 after it experienced cracks and sinking. The road has since metamorphosed into a gnarled, overgrown canyon where residents notice movement even week to week. The situation hit a new low this winter and spring, when more than a dozen water and sewage pipes ruptured in part of the neighborhood, damaging foundations, closing a road and releasing contaminated water — sometimes hundreds of feet from the cliff’s edge.
“There has never been anything like this,” said Alan Moss, who has lived in the neighborhood for 42 years and is Guion’s neighbor and caretaker. “And we’ve had some pretty bad winters…”
Image at top: Residence in Moss Beach ©2014 Gary Griggs.
