About This Site

How items are sourced and checked

These are the standards the site works to. If you find an item that falls short of them, such as a missing source or date, please let us know.

• Official sources come first. Figures and statuses come from the agencies responsible for them whenever possible: the City of Rancho Palos Verdes (land movement updates, survey reports, staff reports and City Council actions), FEMA and Cal OES, Los Angeles County, and the utilities (SCE, SoCalGas and Cal Water). For lawsuits, the site uses court filings or City Council minutes where they are publicly available, and says whose claims it is reporting.
• News reports from local and regional outlets are used for events, context and quotes. When a claim rests on a single news report, the page names that outlet, and official records are checked wherever they exist.
• Items should link to their sources, naming the agency or outlet and giving the date where the source has one. Figures that change over time should carry the date they were reported, written as "as of" a date.
• Numbers are given the way the source gave them. The site does not compute averages, totals or trends that an agency hasn't published. For example, the feet-per-month averages in the City's GPS survey reports are quoted in feet per month, not converted. The one calculation the site makes is on the landslide map and its printable PDF: each GPS monitoring point's movement, which the City's survey spreadsheet gives as a distance in feet over the survey period, is converted to inches per week the way the City's contour maps do it (feet × 12 × 7 ÷ days in the period). Those figures are labeled as PVLandslide.com's calculation and can differ from the City's contour maps by about 0.01 inch per week.
• When sources disagree, the site says so and shows both, or leaves the claim out until it can be confirmed. A missing fact is better than a wrong one.
• Quotations are exact. Paraphrases are not put in quotation marks.

How updates are prepared

Drafts are prepared with the help of an AI assistant. It checks the official pages the site relies on and recent news coverage, and drafts proposed edits with links to the sources they came from. The site's owner reviews each draft before anything is published. Nothing is published automatically.

Tips, documents and photos

You are welcome to send tips, documents, meeting notices, photos and corrections through the contact form. A tip is checked against official records or another reliable source before anything based on it is published. See Privacy for how we may use and publish what you send.

Privacy

Last updated November 4, 2026.

This section explains what information PVLandslide.com collects about visitors and how it may be used and shared. By using the site or sending us information, you agree to it.

Information we collect

What you give us. When you use the contact form, we receive your name (if you give one), email address, topic and message, together with the country your connection appears to come from, plus anything you tell us later.

Collected automatically. Visitor statistics, page-speed figures and map requests are described below. Like any web host, Cloudflare, which hosts the site, handles basic technical information about each request, such as the IP address, browser type, the page requested and the time (Cloudflare's privacy policy); the site's own request and error logs are kept for up to seven days. The site has no user accounts and sets no cookies of its own.

From other sources. We may receive information about you from our affiliates, service providers, public records and other publicly available sources, and combine it with what we collect here.

Visitor statistics (Google Analytics)

The site uses Google Analytics 4, a web analytics service from Google, to count visits and see which pages are read. By default, Google Analytics sets two first-party cookies in your browser, _ga and a second one whose name starts with _ga_. They tell visitors and visits apart, and by default they last up to two years. Google Analytics collects information about your device and browser and about the pages you view and your activity on them. Google says it uses IP addresses to protect its service and to give site owners a sense of where in the world visitors come from, and that Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses. We use these statistics to see which pages and information readers use most. On the landslide map page it also counts which map controls and features are used (layers, background map, zoom and "Show on map" buttons, features opened, and whether the map was first dragged or scrolled); these map events contain no location and nothing you type.

You can block or delete these cookies in your browser settings, or install Google's Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The site works the same without them. Google explains how it uses information from sites that use its services in "How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services".

Sources: Google Analytics Help: cookie usage · Google Analytics Help: data collection

Page speed statistics (Cloudflare Web Analytics)

Cloudflare, which hosts the site, also adds its Web Analytics script to each page. It measures how quickly pages load and which pages are viewed, and sends those figures and the page address to Cloudflare. It sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser, and Cloudflare says it discards your IP address at the data center that receives the figures rather than storing it.

Source: Cloudflare: RUM beacon for Web Analytics

Map tiles

The landslide map loads its background map images from the U.S. Geological Survey's The National Map servers (basemap.nationalmap.gov). Like any web request, those requests give USGS your IP address and browser details and tell it which website the request came from; USGS describes its practices in its privacy policies. The map sets no cookies. The mapping software (Leaflet) and the boundary data are hosted on this site, and the map doesn't ask for or use your location.

Spam protection

To keep out spam, the form checks how quickly it was filled in and that it was sent from this website, lets each page load send one message, and limits how many messages one connection can send (five an hour and twelve a day). For those limits, Cloudflare briefly counts requests from your IP address, and the form keeps a scrambled code made from your IP address (not the address itself) with the times of messages sent, for about a day; the one-time code each page load uses is remembered for about seven hours. Cloudflare's storage can keep backup copies of these records for up to 30 days. While you're sending, your browser keeps a temporary copy of what you typed (in session storage, which is cleared when you close the tab) so it isn't lost if the form sends you back with a problem.

How we use information

We may use information for any lawful business purpose, including to: read and answer your message; follow up on tips and corrections; send you updates about the landslide and related news and services, from us or our affiliates; analyze and improve the site; do research; develop and train software, including artificial intelligence and machine-learning models; prevent spam, fraud and abuse; comply with the law and protect our rights; and for anything else we describe when we collect it or that you agree to.

Tips, corrections, documents, photos and other content you send may be kept, used, edited and published by us, with or without credit and without payment to you. We won't publish your email address, and if you'd rather not be named, say so in your message. We may also create de-identified or aggregated information and use or share it for any purpose.

Who we share it with

We don't sell visitor information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We may share it with our affiliates, for the purposes in this section; with service providers that help run the site, such as Cloudflare (hosting, forms and email delivery) and Google (Google Analytics); with authorities or others when we believe the law requires it or to protect rights, property or safety; and with a buyer or successor if the site is sold, transferred or reorganized. Links to other websites, such as City pages and news outlets, lead to sites that have their own privacy policies.

Keeping and protecting information

We keep information for as long as we have a business or legal reason to, and de-identified information indefinitely. We use reasonable safeguards, but no website or email system is completely secure, and we can't guarantee the security of what you send us.

Do Not Track

The site does not respond to browser Do Not Track signals. Google Analytics, a third party, may collect information about your online activity over time and across different websites.

Your choices, questions and requests

Use the contact form to ask any question about your information, to ask us to stop contacting you, or to ask to see, correct or delete it. We'll respond as applicable law requires and may keep what we need for legal or business records. California residents may ask once a year for a list of the personal information we disclosed to third parties for their own direct marketing in the prior year, and who received it. The site is not directed to children under 16, and we don't knowingly collect their information.

Changes

We may change this section at any time. Changes take effect when posted here with a new date, and your continued use of the site means you accept them. Information collected under an earlier version stays subject to that version unless you agree otherwise.