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 
8 September 2023 at 2:43 pm
I remember when this happened. The whole neighborhood was freaking out.
The speculation from neighbors is that the Central Reservoir on the hill above is leaking a small underground river through McKillop, down underneath the Chinese nursing home on E26th dead end above Sausal Creek.
I was told that the reservoir was built from blocks of Sierra granite in the 1920’s that over time began to leak more and more from settling and earthquakes until a major stream was created, despite their attempts at patching.
When we bought our place on E26th we had to sign off on notification that the house was in a dangerous flood zone due to being downhill from Central Reservoir, I assume everyone nearby did as well.
EBMUD was going to rebuild the reservoir with a couple of big steel tanks, but I don’t know if they ever got around to it. We moved during COVID.