Chunk of L.A. Cliff, Street Slide Into the Pacific

LOS ANGELES – A large chunk of a Los Angeles street and the coastal bluff it sat on have crumbled into the ocean amid heavy rains.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in a statement that a section of Paseo Del Mar in the San Pedro area that for months had been creeping toward the ocean collapsed on Sunday as a storm struck Southern California.

The mayor says there were no injuries and no property was damaged.

The scenic route had already been long closed. It had been bisected by 25-foot-deep fissures in places and the city had erected a chain link fence and warning signs.

The fissures first appeared last spring, and engineers have been monitoring potential landslide risk.

The peninsula's scenic qualities have prompted decades of homebuilding that some experts blame for further destabilizing the historically unstable ocean bluffs.