Halt to train service through San Clemente is indefinite following new landslide
By LAYLAN CONNELLY | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: January 25, 2024
Workers remove a section of the pedestrian beach trail below Buena Vista after a landslide damaged the walkway and stopped rail service between Orange and San Diego counties in San Clemente, CA, on Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Transportation and city officials are again grappling with a landslide that sent debris onto railroad tracks in San Clemente, shutting down the rail line indefinitely.
It’s been a recurring issue in recent years that has decision-makers wondering what to do about the vulnerable section of coastal train tracks. This landslide has also indefinitely disabled the town’s popular coastal trail.
The worsening of the landslide on Wednesday, Jan. 24, caused so much damage to the Mariposa Bridge it was “precariously hanging over the tracks and must be removed as soon as possible,” Councilman Chris Duncan said Thursday morning. “The bridge is beyond repair.”
Passengers and commuters, meanwhile, were left without train service through the affected area, about half a mile from the San Clemente Pier. Metrolink and Amtrak had to cancel trains Wednesday evening, offering commuters vouchers to take ride-sharing services or a bus ride to bridge the gap.
There is no word on how long the service will be interrupted by the latest landslide. Trains will only operate as far south as the Laguna Niguel/Mission Viejo station until further notice, Metrolink officials said in a news alert.
Metrolink is unable to secure enough shuttles or buses to provide alternative transportation between Orange County and Oceanside, said Metrolink spokesperson Scott Johnson.
An estimated 500 passengers either board or disembark Metrolink trains at the San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente and Oceanside stations. On weekdays, an estimated 14 trains operate through the affected section and another 12 on weekends, Johnson said. Amtrak runs 10 northbound and 10 southbound trains through the area daily.
Amtrack’s Pacific Surfliner canceled some trains Thursday and offered a bus bridge in some cases.
Metrolink’s engineering team and track department were on site Thursday to assess the situation to “try and determine how to safely remove the debris on the right of way without triggering additional landslides,” Johnson said.
It’s not the first time this spot has had trouble with movement of the hillside, a landslide in 2019 closed the Mariposa Bridge, shutting off access along San Clemente’s popular 2.3-mile coastal beach trail on the north end of town for months. Another closed the trail again in December.
More hillside movement prompted the city to close the bridge last week for safety reasons and city officials were already coordinating with the private property owner above the landslide and geologists, according to the city.
“It’s been coming down the hill and hitting the bridge. The bridge has been holding it up, basically. Now that the bridge is so destabilized, it has gotten through and washed down onto the tracks,” Duncan said.
The landslide is the latest in a series of slope failures in the beach town the past three years, first on the south end of the city in 2022 with a track closure that lasted months and required $13.7 million in Orange County Transit Authority and state funds to secure the hillside at Cyprus Shores.
A landslide in April at the historic Casa Romantica closed the tracks again and required $8.5 million in city funds to stabilize and is still being monitored carefully as recent storms have soaked the slide area. The OCTA spent another $3 million on a retaining wall to stabilize the base of the slope and protect the tracks from debris.
Another landslide in North Beach a year ago sent residents fleeing from their homes – some were red-tagged temporarily – but the failure was far enough from the tracks to not impact train service that time.
“This is going to be our life, we are going to have these challenges. we are going to have to be very clear-eyed about the fact that these bluff failures and the loss of beach sand and coastal erosion is something we will have to continually deal with,” Duncan said, calling on federal, state, county and city officials to come together to come up with a solution. “It will need to be an all-hands-on-deck approach.”
A long-term fix to the Mariposa Bridge was in the city’s plans, but those funds were used to repair the city-owned Casa Romantica and stabilize the hillside there.
“It’s a good thing we hadn’t repaired the bridge,” Duncan noted. “If we had done the repair we planned, we would have repaired a bridge that then got damaged by this slide.”
Short-term, the area is likely going to need some sort of retaining wall, Duncan said.
Congressman Mike Levin was scheduled on Thursday to host a train ride to announce new federal funding dedicated to the rail corridor, with plans to travel from Oceanside to Los Angeles. With the train route shut down, Levin pivoted to instead visit the landslide site Thursday morning.
During a press conference, Levin announced $53.8 million in new federal funds from the U.S. Department of Transportation to replace the 108-year-old San Dieguito River Railway Bridge, the first step in relocating the tracks off the bluffs in Del Mar where similar issues have been plaquing the rail line.
“You’re only as strong as your weakest link. Our weakest link is here in San Clemente and Del Mar,” Levin said. “If the rail area is closed, you can’t get from San Diego to Los Angeles.”
Levin also announced that the rail line – called the Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo, or LOSSAN, Corridor – has been selected for the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor ID Program, providing Caltrans with a $500,000 grant for planning and development of long-term improvements to the corridor.
The Corridor ID Program will be “critical to unlocking future federal funding sources to prevent further coastal erosion and landslides from impacting service,” Levin’s office said in an announcement.
Levin stopped short of saying the section of rail line in San Clemente should move inland, but noted that federal, state and local funding should be used to engage a stakeholder dialogue.
“I do not pretend to have the answer on stabilization or relocation,” he said during his press conference. “Whether they go, or whether they stay, we are going to need major investments.”
Duncan said geologists expect more land to move as the damaged structures are removed and rain expected next weekend could also cause further problems.
“They are saying this is a very unstable and dangerous area,” Duncan said. “They don’t want anyone near the bridge.”
The OCTA owns the tracks in Orange County, while Metrolink maintains the right-of-way infrastructure.
The OCTA has two studies planned, one for short-term fixes to vulnerable areas, another to explore longer-term solutions.
Laurie Girand, who represents the community activist group Capo Cares, called on officials to move the line inland. And she argued more ridership studies should be done and geological testing to show whether train vibrations, especially from heavy freights that run through the region, are adding to the vulnerability of the soaked, sandy soil where hundreds of homes are located on the cliff.
Supervisor Katrina Foley, who sits on the OCTA board and was recently appointed as vice chair for the LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency, agrees and is asking for those factors to be added to OCTA’s short-term study.
Foley is hoping for a study of the bluff, no matter if it is public or private land, to find other risk areas, she said.
“We will work on this tirelessly. We can not keep shutting down the rail service,” Foley said. “We can’t just measure where we’ve already seen landslides, we need to be proactive to show where we have risk. It’s a lot more expensive to react. We keep investing millions and millions of dollars reacting, instead of proactive planning to prevent.”
Levin noted $3.5 million has been secured in this year’s federal budget for OCTA’s long-term study, but that still needs to be approved in Congress.
“Everyday, it seems like a new bandage they need to put on. Every time is a reminder that we have to be thinking about long-term stability,” he said.
The OCTA already in 2021 completed a study assessing how future climate change could affect the Orange County rail corridor, especially along the 7-mile section that runs along the coast in Dana Point through San Clemente and down to Oceanside.
Slope failure and erosion were addressed, with the study looking at changing precipitation patterns as well as coastal storm patterns that can affect erosion and increase the likelihood of slopes being unstable.
The Mariposa Bridge was identified as among the most exposed sections of tracks.
The OCTA explored relocation of the train inland to run along the 5-freeway in its climate change assessment, though that option would come with a price tag in the billions of dollars, the study says. A two-segment rail tunnel looked at could be built along Interstate 5 from San Onofre State Beach to Avenida Aeropuerto in San Juan Capistrano for an estimated $5.9 billion.
“We all need to develop a plan to address this proactively, so we are not playing defense. That has not happened before – this is relatively new that we have gotten these kind of landslide on a recurring basis,” Duncan said. “We’re going to need to take a more forward-looking approach, or we will keep finding ourselves in these situations.”