Photograph by Thomas Larson

Dr. Pat Davis, one of the survivors who has fought hard to avenge the deaths of three women in his family, posed in front of their memorial bench for my camera.

Life guards

At the top of the Grandview stairway sits a bench, dedicated to the memory of the three women who died under the weight of a 50-ton blockfall in 2019. In a late-July meetup, Dr. Pat Davis, one of the survivors who has fought hard to avenge their deaths, posed in front of the bench for my camera. Behind him is a chain-link fence walling off the condo colony of Seabluffe, many of its units seasonally occupied. As the cliff has weathered and retracted, the community, built in 1974 and numbering 255 units, has crept closer to the edge. Between the ocean-view condos and that edge is a brow ditch for rain runoff; it’s cracked and broken in spots, allowing rain to seep into the bluff.

Bibi Fell, the lead attorney for the Davis family.

Photograph by Juliet Sanders

Davis and I walked down the stairway where we met Ian, as I’ll call him, a lifeguard perched in a tower 50 feet above the beach. It’s his 14th summer as a lifeguard; he has a great panoptic view of beach, cliffs, and water. Listening to the surging Padres on the radio, he was tracking with binoculars a few young swimmers and 20-odd surfers as the tide stretched up and over the smooth stones piled onto Grandview’s narrow strip.

To our right, as if on cue, we espied a family of six, outfitted with umbrella and coolers, crammed in under the toe-wall where Davis’s wife Julie, sister-in-law Elizabeth, and daughter Annie were crushed. I expected Davis to react. But he didn’t, not openly. He said he’d visited the site all too often — and nothing had changed. “Ian,” he said, calmly, “I just want to remind you that right where those people are sitting, three women died five years ago. Isn’t it your job to keep people away from those cliffs?”

Ian said he knew about Davis and the tragedy. He paused, and the air filled with an unspoken apology. I wondered if he understood the question’s implication. Who, if not lifeguards, is responsible for keeping people on the shore safe from an unstable bluff?

Lifeguards, Ian said, “have no authority to make them leave.” Yes, they’ll use the bullhorn to warn kids against shimmying up the cliff. Davis, civil as a country lawyer, persisted. He asked if Ian had told the family not to set up there. “Yes, I did,” Ian said. “I usually hit them up on their way down, I told them [the tide] is going up to the rocks [at the base of the bluff]. And she [the grandmother] goes, ‘We still got a little time, then.’ So, I said, ‘Stay away from the cliff because it’s dangerous.’ And she goes, ‘What are you gonna do?’”

(In his deposition, Quinn Norwood, the lifeguard on duty the day of the Grandview failure, recalled that he wasn’t in the tower when the mass severed and fell. “I was on break [another lifeguard had relieved him] just south of the stairs...I had my headphones in and was working out. Pushups, sit-ups...I didn’t see the bluff collapse.” He maintained that “I’m not physically allowed to move anyone nor am I going to call police to make them move.”)

Ian echoed Norwood’s stance. His priority is to watch people in the water. He said he scrutinizes beachgoers “when they come down the steps” — newbies like light-skinned folks with no tan or those who are gazing rapturously at the great expanse of the ocean for the first time. Lifeguards gripe less about locals, more about tourists, a harder group to police. They’ll react: “You can’t tell me what to do. This is a public beach.”

Moreover, lifeguards shy away from disagreements. Ian gets pissed if young kids “pretend” to be drowning, though he can tell an act from the real thing. He said Encinitas has neither the money nor the desire to have a vehicle patrol the beach and warn, move, or fine rule-breakers. For beachgoers to set up away from the cliff, sand is desperately needed at Grandview. Last year’s Army Corps of Engineers’ sand replenishment project excluded Beacon’s and Grandview. It’s unclear whether they favored the wider beaches without bluffs like Moonlight, spots far more trafficked.

Surveying the scene, Davis said, “This is just ridiculous.” And then, his demeanor changed. He intoned, “How beautiful it is here,” a love of place, I understood, as wounded as it is healable. He said he’d like to tell the family to move. However, “If I did go and educate them, they’d still elect to stay there.” He and Ian discussed the quandary everyone faces as the tide crawls in. In an hour or so, there’ll be no place for the family to move to; they’ll need to walk a half-mile north to where the cliffs end. Until then, what are the odds that the same tragedy will occur right there, right now, right in front of us? The odds are incalculable, of course.

But what if, to the contrary, real beach safety is calculable and predictable? What if a law, using scientific monitoring and shifts in the public’s habits and expectations, could eradicate the danger?

The settlement

In late September, a settlement between the four defendants and the plaintiffs made it through the California legislature (the vote was 77 to 0) and Governor Newsom signed it. Despite (or because of) five years of negotiations, the terms were simple, albeit expensive: the defendants must pay $32.85 million. (The opening figure, lead attorney Bibi Fell told me, was $100 million.) The Davis, Cox, and Clave families receive $13,300,000 to cover “claims, settlements, or judgments against the state.” The City of Encinitas owes another, $13,300,000. And Seabluffe and Seabreeze, the condo association and its management company, owe $6,250,000. As of November, the money, coming in slowly but surely, is being divided according to the ten plaintiffs’ private wishes.

The Grandview Beach staircase remains as is, despite some geologists’ testimony that the structure is weakly reinforced and may have contributed to the 2019 collapse.

Photograph by Thomas Larson

In addition, Fell told me that Encinitas must, by the end of 2024, wage “a public safety campaign.” This campaign will add new signs with QR codes to be set “in conspicuous places at or near beach entrances.” Those beaches are within the 3.6 miles of the city limits and are “lifeguarded” by the city. The “enhanced signage and verbiage” affects five Encinitas beaches. “One or more” signs will state, “In Memory of the Davis and Cox families.” The city’s website will include “more robust information” about unstable cliffs as well as video programs and new “written policies and procedures” about beach safety. Additionally, lifeguards must make “reasonable efforts” to tell beachgoers not to set up under a protruding cliff. To cover the city’s liability, however, “there can be no expectation that bluff warnings to beachgoers can always occur.” Such warnings are not a lifeguard’s priority. His job remains to watch the water. Implied in the settlement is no penalty for or removal of people who are told of the danger and choose to stay put.

Life-saving fixes, according to Davis, are outside the scope of the settlement. Neither the state, which owns the beaches, nor the Army Corps of Engineers, which dredges and spreads sea-washed sand, nor clifftop homeowners, who mark their presence with heavily watered landscapes, are required to make any changes. There is nothing about restricting the number of beachgoers, erecting toe-walls or concrete barriers along weakened bluffs, cutting back ice plant, or adding sand at Grandview, North County’s narrowest and most rip-rap-strewn of all beaches. The staircase remains as is, despite some geologists’ testimony that the structure is weakly reinforced and may have contributed to the 2019 collapse. (Fell said she believes the staircase is “better fortified than the cliff. The city took additional fortification measures like putting up a seawall, digging down and adding a cement base” when it was rebuilt with timber and concrete in 1992, 32 years ago.)

One reason the State of California did not agree to physical changes at Grandview devolves to the Coastal Commission’s policy of “managed retreat.” Homeowners desperately want seawalls and other backstops to slow or stop cliff erosion. The recent acceleration of deteriorating bluffs threatens their homes stability and their value as well as people who picnic at the cliff-base. The Coastal Commission will grant permission only for defensive walls “against the ocean” when scientists prove an imminent danger to people. Whether it’s access points to city and state beaches or the erosive presence of blufftop homes and yards, managed retreat means to move back and/or leave the coast for good, so nature can reassert itself.

To make fixes to the cliffs, at the top or at the base, contradicts nature and state law, and so positions blockfalls on the sooner side of inevitability. What truly needs fixing, though vanity and desire are as strong as high tide, is people’s expectation that as long as their property is grandfathered in, they can live where and how they want to. It’s a belief no longer grounded in precedent. The government has ruled: the more entities mess with the cliffs and the beaches in North County, the more liability they create for themselves.

Why did this settlement take as long as it did? Fell noted that whenever state negotiators agree to a settlement that’s over $10 million, it must be approved by the legislature. The body votes on it and enacts a law “to appropriate the money to pay the settlement.” As far as she knows, Newsom neither balked nor questioned the amount. The litigation wagon plodded along due to a bevy of factions — four defendants, three plaintiff families, each with one or more counsels — which resulted in an “extraordinary amount of discovery.” Depositions from expert witnesses, geologists, structural engineers, hydrologists, city officials, the survivors, and one on-duty lifeguard — his testimony, 451 pages. The engineers attested to the instability of the cliffs and helped establish the civil liability. The goal of the lawsuit was — or became — less about structural changes for the bluffs and more about financial awards for the families.

While the families wanted physical changes — take out non-native plants, fortify private property with toe-walls, replenish sand, fill in bluff notches, re-channel irrigation — most of which Pat Davis had no idea, initially, were Coastal Commission “no-no’s.” Fell said the plaintiffs’ ultimate bargaining power might be embodied by the maxim, “money moves people, and money moves entities.” Moreover, such a large award is newsworthy, and will “capture people’s attention and make them more aware of the cliff danger.”

What remains unsetttled 

When I met with Pat Davis, he expressed scant comfort with the settlement. Why? “It still hurts,” he said. Over our 90 minutes, our revisiting it all felt triggering — flummoxed exasperation with the case’s snail-like pace and insuperable sorrow for his wife and daughter’s disappearance that day. He said there’s “no closure. I’m as lonely and lost as I was when it happened.”

One of the knottier questions I raised centered on “relief.” What might it look like?“Funny you should ask,” he said. “My kids ask me that all the time.” Why not just let it go, Dad? What you’re trying to do is impossible. The grandkids, he went on to say, suffer needlessly at their peers’ accusation: “‘Why are you complaining? You got millions of dollars because your mom died,’ they say.” Davis agrees he should let it go: “It’s a good idea. I should.” But it’s not possible, he said. Why? He won’t give up. “To me, the more knowledge I gain, the more momentum I pick up.” To push for beach safety is Davis’s fountain — not of youth, but of tenacity. As for the emotional cost of “relief,” he said, “Here’s a good answer I can give you. It’ll hurt a lot less if I’ve tried to do something and somebody else’s family gets killed.” If he didn’t try, “that would be unbearable.” It’s his seawall of self-protection against what he believes will happen again.

Pat Davis says there’s “no closure. I’m as lonely and lost as I was when it happened.”

Photograph by Juliet Sanders

Nearly $33 million is a lot of money. Of course, the projected amount alone occasioned surprises for Davis during the arduous negotiations. As the case’s publicity grew, he got “nasty letters” from Encinitas townies — many defamatory, though he couldn’t sue because none were signed. In a nutshell, the trolls alleged the cliff collapsed because of “natural causes,” and blamed Davis for “milking the city.” The harassers said that “I was showing no respect for my wife and daughter.” Their motive, he thinks, was to embarrass him — a dental legend who for 45 years cleaned and filled cavities for thousands of local kids’ teeth — with the specious charge that since he was well-off already, the payout proved he was greedy.

Uninvolved with the city’s policies and ordinances before the women’s deaths, Davis has become a savvy advocate who knows the procedural ropes. His list of phone contacts looks like ship’s manifest. He said he and the city “are in a courtship phase. This year I’ve had the guy running for mayor and people running for city council take me to lunch.” He said they want his support — to align with his cause for beach safety as well as catch a few rays of his profile. “I’ve kept my nose pretty clean in this city. My wife Julie was a wonderful, warm person who had a lot of female friends. We’re still well respected.”

Again, a lot of money — and put to what use, I asked. Davis has thought of scholarship funds, video production, even a foundation to award grants for students who create fresh public restraints, say, Beachgoer Beware, or a more strategic approach: Once scientists declare a cliff or beach site is unsafe, one or both of these ordinances, city-council adopted, should be automatic: a) yellow caution tape prohibits nearness to the I.D.-ed bluff, and b) lifeguards or beach patrollers are deputized to write tickets with stiff fines for violators. Davis said that the current “law” ticketing people for a dog or a beer is ludicrous in comparison to allowing sand-lovers to sit anywhere.

To further stiffen the regulations, Davis wants signs —“Danger: Do Not Sit Here!” — placed halfway up a 20-foot stainless steel pipe, “tall enough so waves can’t knock it over.” One final inarguable card in his deck, the coup de grâce, as it were: With ladders and hoists, engineers should bore a large vibrating tool into the impaired cliff and “release it, you know, go ahead and let the thing fall.” That, for Davis, would offer some relief to the coming erosive nightmares along miles of the San Diego coastline.

Insurance

For the fiscal year 2024-2025, the Encinitas city council approved a budget that includes $135 million in revenue (86.6 percent comes from taxes) and $132 in expenditures. A claim of $13.3 million would be one-tenth of the budget, a civic disaster if the money had to come out of its general fund. Instead, the payor is, by design, the nationwide insurance pool provider for municipalities, called PRISM: Public Risk, Innovation, Solutions, and Management.

Mike Pott, its chief operating officer, said that as a member, the City of Encinitas pays a premium every July to cover potential claims that result from a jury trial or a settlement. He noted that he couldn’t comment on the Davis lawsuit because “it hasn’t been closed by the claims department.” He did say that due to increasingly hefty awards for civic damages and wrongful death, the California insurance market has taken a beating. Several big-name insurers have left (think multimillion dollar disbursements for abuse cases, oil spills, and earthquakes), and the cost of reinsurance is rising. Insurance companies need insurance themselves against pricier losses and elevated risk — in effect, a pool of insurers, to guard against onerous suits. Like a tariff, they pass on their cost to the municipalities.

“We provide a certain amount of limits per claim to our membership,” Pott said. If a member exceeds that limit, the entity may pay a higher premium, backstop their risk by buying more insurance, and dig into its general fund. Encinitas maintains a self-insurance fund — this year, $14.1 million, 10 percent higher than 2023. This money is not used to pay lawsuit settlements, but does cover “employee health claims,” its revenues coming from departmental and employee contributions.

Previously, the largest award Encinitas paid for a personal injury lawsuit was $11 million to Roberta Walker, a biking enthusiast who was hit by a truck in Encinitas along Coast Highway 101 in December 2018. Among her many severe fractures, she suffered a traumatic brain injury. Three years later, the city, in a closed session, settled with Walker after failing to find a “design immunity” that would apply to the accident’s location.

Davis said that, as of my deadline, the city has not contacted him. Mayor Tony Kranz, in his statement, called the tragedy “unavoidable.” Davis still strenuously disputes that.

Lois Yum, Encinitas public information officer, said that PRISM will cover the $13.3 million award in a lump sum to the plaintiffs; no general fund money will be tapped, though some outlay is necessary for the signage and verbiage requirements. In an email, she said, “Signs with ‘In Memory Of’ [the victims] will be posted and enhanced at the beach access points—D Street [Boneyards], Swamis, Stone Steps, Grandview, Moonlight Beach.” She did not say how the cost of the settlement will affect the yearly PRISM premium.

As for any permanent “off-limits” designation for severely unstable cliffs, of which Grandview is the most egregious, Yum wrote that “when a local collapse occurs and is identified by lifeguards, additional warning signs are installed, and the area is cordoned off with tape.” The passive voice here entangles the meaning. It’s not clear that lifeguards, who are tasked to watch the water, possess any authority to “identify” dangerous cliffs. Shouldn’t the city’s response be to cordon off the beach and hire experts to assess future danger? In the words of Mayor Kranz, the city should request after any cliff failure that beachgoers “stay as far away as possible from the bluffs.” That’s a start. But questions remain about enforcement: for how long is the site closed? Who keeps people away? Who is ultimately responsible for fixing the problem?

The science

One thing is, or should be, clear — a decision to close and fix a cliff should be takeen out of the hands of politicians. This point is underscored by the brushoff Davis got from then-Mayor Catherine Blakespear. Instead, call on those who know the geomorphology of our coastal bluffs. A policy of authorizing scientists as first responders is well underway. In 2021, California Assembly Bill 66 (and a subsequent extension, AB 72, in 2023) was passed, introduced and pushed by the 77th District assemblywoman, Tasha Boerner, who represents the coastal zone from Oceanside to the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result of Davis’s testimony in Sacramento in 2021, Boerner secured $2.5 million to study the feasibility of a warning system. The money requires Scripps Institute of Oceanography “to conduct research on coastal cliff landslides and erosion in the county of San Diego.” A report to the legislature recommending plans “for developing a coastal cliff landslide and erosion early warning system” is due by March, 2026.

The bill targets Beacon’s Beach and the city of Del Mar. Beacon’s long zigzaggy dirt-and-wooden-steps trail has been closed on and off this year due to landslides triggered by a shaky bluff, winter storms, and a crumbling parking lot. City engineers had to move the lot to the east of the “bluff failure plane,” a geographic fissure. A healthy tremor west of that plane would likely cause the parking lot to plunge, pile, and end beach access. The Beacon’s upgrade should be done by Thanksgiving. Del Mar, of course, is the site of ongoing and temporary construction to shore up the railroad tracks from slipping further down, and to keep the bluffs above it intact.

All this unsettledness occurs along the San Diego coastline where bluffs predominate. According to Scripps Institute of Oceanography, some 4000 landslides have occurred in the last three years at Del Mar and Torrey Pines alone. Many are small in size and occur at night, lessening hazards for people. On North County beaches, blockfalls and towering cliffs go hand-in-hand, and sizable failures occur about once a month.

Mark Zumberge, UCSD geophysicist, and Adam Young, UCSD geomorphologist, are doing the research and compiling the report. They are using devices to measure and log movement within the cliffs, with the goal of alerting officials about potential collapses. Recently, one or more of the devices or sensors, Young told me, “recorded some unique ground-motion observations at three different landslides. The sensors showed increasing ground movement leading up to the cliff failures.” The measuring equipment includes the following:

Strainmeter: cliffs are composed of sandstone that continuously cracks and settles. The phenomenon is called “land subsidence.” The borehole strainmeter is a tube laden with optical fibers and sunk deep into a cliff to monitor how sedimentary stresses make the bluff stretch, compress, and distort, producing tremors and blockfalls.

Tiltmeter: Adam Young notes that a weakening cliff “tends to creep toward the ocean and then fail catastrophically.” The tiltmeter contains a bubble inside a fluid that slides side to side like a carpenter’s level from tectonic activity, tidal forces, and storm surges. The plan is to record these tilts over time and map patterns that can reliably signal a bluff about to sever.

LiDAR: Using a truck-mounted system, LiDAR (light pulsed from a laser that penetrates Earth’s surface and maps the subsoil) creates detailed 3D models of San Diego County coastal bluffs. The method compiles data from weekly “drive-by” readings of selected “hot spots” where bluff failure is most likely. Seasonal rainfall and soil saturation are the main culprits in loosening debris or blocks.

What remains

Inside Pat Davis’s Encinitas home are columns of treasured family photos on tables, shelves, and walls. One that grabs my eye is of a young Annie running on the beach in a wetsuit, board under her arm, having ridden or about to ride a wave. She’s smiling, if not laughing with an ecstatic abandon. On the wall is another photo, an overhead shot of a paddle-out honoring Annie’s memory. A Hawaiian tradition, surfers paddle out with leis, form a circle, clasp hands, remember their fellow wave-rider with stories and prayer, and toss the leis into the circle. These two photos share an essence: Annie’s love of communing with the water and how beloved she was for that communion by family and friends. The ocean, it’s said, is beyond our comprehension, an unfathomable mystery. In the shared sound of the images, I hear that beyond and that mystery washing over her feet on the sand and retreating out to where the feet of more than one-hundred paddlers hang in the water and who, for the moment, are safe from the fatal shore.