A landslide reduced a Los Angeles house under renovation to a jumble of lumber, pulled the pool and deck away from a second home, and left the pool at a third residence on the edge of a huge fissure early Wednesday.
The slide occurred just before 3am in Sherman Oaks, a neighborhood of expensive homes about 12 miles (19km) north-west of downtown. An initial search found no victims, but several people were evacuated from one house, the Los Angeles fire department said in a statement.
There was no immediate word on the cause of the landslide, but numerous slides have happened in southern California due to drenching winter storms that saturated the ground.
Since 1 January, downtown LA has had almost 16 in (41cm) of rain, which is nearly twice what it normally gets by this time of the year. By early February, the city had reported nearly 600 mudslides, had red-tagged 16 buildings as unsafe to enter and had yellow-tagged more than 30 others, limiting access to them.