Joannou

Plaintiffs Andrea Joannou and 25 Oak, LLC, appeal from the summary judgment entered in favor of defendant City of Rancho Palos Verdes (City) in their action to apply the Cullen Earthquake Act (Code Civ. Proc., § 751.50 et seq.) to quiet title in them to city-owned land where homes they bought were deposited over the course of many years by a slow-moving landslide. We affirm because the Cullen Earthquake Act does not apply to lot line displacements resulting from ongoing and gradual earth movements.

FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

In 1956, road construction by Los Angeles County in a then unincorporated area of the Palos Verdes Hills known as Portuguese Bend accidentally reactivated a subsurface prehistoric slide area. That incident sent just under one square mile of hillside property on an ongoing, slow-motion, downhill journey that inexorably leads to a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As a result, homes built in the area have moved along with the land, in some cases outside their original lot lines and onto neighboring parcels. Homeowners in the area have turned to innovative methods of anchoring their homes in place even as the landslide moves down the hill. Some…