Trump National Golf Club—25 Years after a 17 Acre Landslide Destroys the 18th Hole in Rancho Palos Verdes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twenty-five years ago, the development of the Trump National Golf Club, the most expensive golf course ever built at that time, was nearing completion in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. However, an ancient landslide, known as Landslide C, lay silently beneath the 18th green, poised to put an end to the project. On June 2, 1999, the 68,796 m2 (17 acres) area of Landslide C reactivated in a dramatic and rapid event. The primary movement involved a large translational block located in the central portion of the slide mass, which shifted downward by nearly 3 m (10 ft) and horizontally (seaward) by approximately 15.2 m (50 ft). Beneath the slide was a nearly horizontal layer of bentonite, ranging from 3.2 to 76.2 mm (1/8–3 in.) thick, which, when exposed to water, becomes extremely slippery due to its low friction properties. The slide itself measured up to 518 m (1,700 ft) in length, 122 m (400 ft) in width, and reached depths over 21.3 m (70 ft). The landslide took with it much of the 18th hole, including the fairway and green, along with the bluff edge, pedestrian trails, bike path, and a section of a major Los Angeles County Sanitation District sewer line. Many experts believe that a leak in the sewer line or a newly constructed water feature on the golf course may have allowed fluid to infiltrate and saturate the thin bentonite layer, triggering the catastrophic landslide event. The solution to this catastrophic failure was the construction of a 32 m (105 ft) high, nearly vertical geosynthetic reinforced retaining wall, which was the tallest near-vertical geotextile reinforced wrap-faced buttress wall in North America at the time. Now, 25 years later, as many areas around Rancho Palos Verdes continue to slide toward the Pacific Ocean, the impact of this natural disaster still lingers in the history of the golf course, shaping both its physical landscape and the story of its construction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".