Los Angeles City and County officials including Supervisor Don Knabe, LA City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and LA City Council candidate Joe Buscaino visited the Paseo Del Mar landslide in San Pedro Wednesday morning and were briefed by Mark Pestrella, Assistant Director of Public Works and Hector J. Bordas, Area Engineer for the Flood Maintenance Division of Public Works.

"The whole area is unstable," Pestrella told the visiting officials. "This is what we call coastal bluff landslide.  The material here, because it does not have high cohesion, wants to slip into the ocean. So what is happening is that the continental shelf is pushing up under the geology here, uplifting the slopes. Slopes get over seep and the material is not solid uniform geology, its sandstone, and wants to slip towards the ocean," he said.

Pestrella said the land slide is a naturally occurring event. "What the problem is, a lot of the infrastructure is in the way," he said.

While the city and county workers are stabilizing the utilities, Pestrella says their main concern is the safety of the public. "We are appealing to the public sense of safety and common sense not to enter into the area because its a very unstable condition at this time," he said.

Supervisor Knabe says that he has personally seen dramatic movement in the last ten days. "We are working in conjunction with the city of Los Angeles and their responsibilities as it relates to the road and everything. We just need to keep working together and get this thing done and separated so that we can look at a potential solution at some point once the city gets done with the geological survey," he said.