More than a week after a 30-by-60-foot sinkhole swallowed the road beside Nicolas Cage's beachfront Malibu estate, the 62-year-old actor's $10.5 million property remains on the edge of collapse, and crews are still racing to stabilize the ground beneath it.
The crater opened around 5:45 a.m. on September 8 along Sea Level Drive, a gated oceanfront community near Point Lechuza in Malibu, California. The private road, the only way in or out for dozens of homes, buckled and dropped 25 to 30 feet, exposing waves and structural beams underneath. A gas leak erupted almost immediately. Emergency crews shut off gas and water lines, and by 6 p.m. that evening Malibu officials had declared a local emergency, the New York Post reported.
Cage bought the oceanfront property for $10.5 million in 2024. The star of "Face/Off," "Con Air," and "Gone in 60 Seconds" now owns a home described as sitting right in the middle of the destruction. Thirty-one homes in the community were evacuated. Seven were red-tagged over structural danger. Another 24 were red-tagged because fire trucks and ambulances could no longer reach them, the road they depend on no longer exists.
Officials blamed severe coastal erosion driven by Hurricane Marie, which sent powerful surf, high tides, and punishing waves into the Southern California coast. The Los Angeles County Fire Department attributed the collapse directly to that erosion, Fox News reported. The storm's effects were not a surprise. The City of Malibu had already warned publicly that it was "preparing for potential strong storms, strong waves, heavy rain, mudslides, and coastal erosion that are possible along the entire Southern California coast due to the forecast strong El Niño conditions."
That warning makes the timeline more troubling. Two days before the sinkhole opened, on September 6, emergency crews had already responded to a gas main break at the same location on Sea Level Drive. Whether that earlier break was fully repaired before the ground collapsed remains unclear.
By the time the road gave way on September 8, the sinkhole measured roughly 30 by 60 feet across and plunged up to 30 feet deep. Waves continued to slam into the exposed coastline beyond the homes. Authorities warned the hole was expanding, and Breitbart reported that conditions were "likely to worsen with forecasted high tides and rain caused by Hurricane Marie." The American Red Cross opened a shelter at Malibu High School for displaced residents.
Geologists and engineers have been working to shore up the area, protect home foundations, and build temporary coastal erosion barriers. The eventual plan calls for filling the crater and rebuilding the road. But more than a week after the collapse, no official timeline for completion, or for allowing residents back, has been made public.
The scope of the damage is hard to overstate for the families involved. Thirty-one oceanfront homes lost their only access route in a matter of minutes. Seven of those homes may not be structurally safe to occupy. The remaining 24 are technically intact but cut off from emergency services, meaning a medical crisis, a fire, or another gas leak could turn deadly with no way for first responders to reach them.
And the ocean has not stopped. Waves keep battering the exposed cliff face where the road used to be. Every high tide carries the risk of further erosion.
Cage paid eight figures for the Sea Level Drive property just two years ago. Whether the home survives intact, or whether it joins the road at the bottom of a hole, depends on how fast crews can stabilize a coastline that Hurricane Marie rearranged in a matter of hours.
No injuries have been reported. But the financial exposure is enormous, and not just for a Hollywood star who can afford the loss. Thirty other homeowners in the same gated community face the same eroding ground, the same red tags, and the same uncertainty about when, or whether, they can go home.
Several basic questions remain unanswered. What will the road repair and erosion mitigation cost? Who pays for it on a private road in a gated community? Was the September 6 gas main break a warning sign that went unheeded? And is Cage even living in the home, or is it sitting empty while the cliff beneath it crumbles?
California's coastline has a way of reminding people that nature does not care what you paid for the view, and that no amount of money buys a government that plans ahead.
