 It's a beautiful day for a walk in the Morgan Territory region of Mount Diablo. The residents are here hiking up and down this stretch of road. It's a great cardio workout, a quarter to a half mile for some. Students are dropped off after school and make the long asphalt trek home, and some have found other ways to save steps. But it's not by choice. Their cars are left in makeshift parking lots along the side of the road. This section of the road is unusable, unsafe. The buckles, the undulations, the massive cracks that have since been filled with sand and gravel are all the result of a landslide in mid-February. So check this out. I'm standing smack dab in the middle of Morgan Territory Road here in Contra Costa County. It's the middle here, but not up here. It's because a landslide has shifted this entire section of road downhill. It all started about a hundred feet up the hill here. And all the mud and debris, it all slid, but it slid underneath the road, not on top of it. The slide plane was beneath the surface and was already saturated from weeks of heavy rain. Just couldn't hold any longer. We're estimating it's about three or four, three to four hundred feet. A subterranean slide, as long as a football field. The residents below were lucky it stopped where it did. Analyzing the slide. And these are the things they're inspecting. Chris Lowell, a senior engineer with Contra Costa County, and this team from the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. They're one of several teams fanning out around the county and around the state, assembling what are called preliminary damage assessments, or PDAs. This process happens after severe weather or other kinds of disasters. This one being the storms that blasted through in February. The amount of precipitation so far this winter was record breaking, and in this case, road breaking. And in this case, the ground was saturated already, so it probably didn't take too much for the rest of it to go. And here. Here too. You wouldn't know to look at Alhambra Valley Road that luck was on their side when it went. Got lucky that we were out here. And if we weren't out here, someone could have just probably driven in through it. A 96-inch pipe couldn't contain the amount of water trying to push through it. Now look at the results. The estimated cost of damage. Take our pie up into three, four million. PDAs are the first step in the federal disaster declaration process. PDA teams conduct thorough on-site assessment of the impacts to public infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, culverts, and public buildings. They're used to help the governor decide whether to make a request for a major disaster or emergency declaration. They're also used by the president to determine a response to the governor's request for a federal declaration. Adding up the totals can lead to shock for county governments. And that's why these PDAs are so important and why the emergency recovery process exists. Yeah, we're really hoping for funding because if we had to pay for and foot the bill for these projects, we just don't have the revenue for that. So it's important for us to go after the available funds for these damages. For more information on these and other disaster response and recovery efforts and programs, be sure to go to caloes.ca.gov and oesnews.com. Reporting for OESNews.com, I'm Shawn Boyd.