In December 2006, I read a series of news stories about a landslide in Fruitvale, on McKillop Road, that took out a house and threatened two more, so I checked it out and was so impressed I wrote it up for About.com. This house was the victim.
And this was its front yard. When I revisited, last week, the three concrete steps were still there and the little pine tree next to them was over 20 feet tall.
This slump was the extension of an adjoining land failure earlier that year. In 2006 I was able to make my way across the top of that older slump and take this shot from the other side.
Nowadays the scene is well secured and overgrown with brush, but nevertheless the land is basically ruined. The city is storing some stuff there, and there are some beehives.
You can’t really fix landslide scars. On the human scale, they’re permanent. And landslides tend to feed on each other — when a portion of a slope fails, the adjoining slopes often follow. That’s the case on McKillop Road. William D. Wood Park is actually the scar of much larger landslides that have occurred, according to one report, since 1909.
The Oakland Tribune reported in 1936 after one such slide, “The property upon which the houses were built was originally filled-in ground from excavations made at the [Central Reservoir] site 15 years ago, neighbors said.” Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, it was routinely called the city’s worst landslide. Studies were made along with attempts to stabilize the slope, to little avail. Homeowners were putting their houses on jacks.
Everyone gave up fighting nature in the 1970s, and they made the land a park. And so far so good — here it was in 2006:
And how it looks today.
Nature may not have given up fighting us, though.
Oakland Geology 
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