Oso Disaster Had Its Roots In Earlier Landslides 64
vinces99 writes: The disastrous March 22 landslide that killed 43 people in the rural Washington state community of Oso involved the "remobilization" of a 2006 landslide on the same hillside, a new federally sponsored geological study concludes. The research indicates the landslide, the deadliest in U.S. history, happened in two major stages. The first stage remobilized the 2006 slide, including part of an adjacent forested slope from an ancient slide, and was made up largely or entirely of deposits from previous landslides. The first stage ultimately moved more than six-tenths of a mile across the north fork of the Stillaguamish River and caused nearly all the destruction in the Steelhead Haven neighborhood. The second stage started several minutes later and consisted of ancient landslide and glacial deposits. That material moved into the space vacated by the first stage and moved rapidly until it reached the trailing edge of the first stage, the study found. "Perhaps the most striking finding is that, while the Oso landslide was a rare geologic occurrence, it was not extraordinary," said Joseph Wartman, a University of Washington associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and a team leader for the study.
OSO (Score:2, Funny)
Watching the hourglass (Score:1)
When I was little toddler I was fascinated by an hourglass --- particularly on the almost hidden but still perceivable pattern of a new slide happened on the back of an ancient slide
Many things that we observe, even from something as tiny as the sandslides inside an hourglass, can be magnified many folds, and still hold true
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Sand slides in an hour glass are instances of "Self Organizing Criticality" [wikipedia.org]
There is a book [surrey.ac.uk]
Re:OSO (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem was that libertarians fought hard and demanded the right to die in a landslide, and then they won that right. Famously kooky Richard A. Epstein and his political brethren demanded that big government bureaucrats stay out of his business when they tried to tell him that he lived underneath an inevitable landslide. He went to political meetings and courtrooms angrily demanding his right to live and die however he wanted. He got his way. I personally have zero sympathy for them. They were asshats who wouldn't accept good advice when it was given to them. They deserve to become lessons to the rest of us.
I also reject the suggest that his hard-fought freedom made his life better. No, it didn't He could have lived equally well a quarter mile down the road where the rest of us wouldn't have to pay a bunch of money and do a bunch of work dealing with the disaster that befell him. It could have been a landslide onto an unoccupied hillside, but no, because of that jackass and his jackass friends we all have to deal with it as a human tragedy.
Screw them. They don't like it when we tell them not to live under disaster-prone hillsides? Well I don't like it when I have to clean up his postmortem mess. Preventing this mess is why we tried so many times to tell him not to live there in the first place.
eh? (Score:3)
To summarize the summary: "The most striking finding is that...it was not extraordinary."
Not to belittle the loss of those involved but it's always a bit much that 43 dead in the US = catastrophe. If this had happened in Asia or Africa it wouldn't make the news unless hundreds or thousands had been killed.
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He/she/it is clearly bashing the selectiveness of the News Outlets, not The Country.
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I wonder how much news coverage that landslide got in Asia or Africa? If it happens somewhere else it's bad, if it happens in your backyard it's a catastrophe.
Another way to say that is that Americans tend to only care what happens in the US, for the most part, thus increasing the relative importance of what happens in the US versus what happens elsewhere in the world.
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To summarize the summary: "The most striking finding is that...it was not extraordinary."
Not to belittle the loss of those involved but it's always a bit much that 43 dead in the US = catastrophe. If this had happened in Asia or Africa it wouldn't make the news unless hundreds or thousands had been killed.
You are assuming that the Oso slide made the Asian and African news outlets.
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To summarize the summary: "The most striking finding is that...it was not extraordinary."
Not to belittle the loss of those involved but it's always a bit much that 43 dead in the US = catastrophe. If this had happened in Asia or Africa it wouldn't make the news unless hundreds or thousands had been killed.
You are assuming that the Oso slide made the Asian and African news outlets.
No I am not and I don't see how you arrived at your conclusion -
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Ignore my previous post - I see you were answering someone else
Re:eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
To summarize the summary: "The most striking finding is that...it was not extraordinary."
Not to belittle the loss of those involved but it's always a bit much that 43 dead in the US = catastrophe. If this had happened in Asia or Africa it wouldn't make the news unless hundreds or thousands had been killed.
Who cares what it's called? No one I know of is trying to compare this to the horrific losses in Japan after the tsunami, or other major disasters around the world. It was a big deal to us here in WA state (and I heard the terms "disaster" and "tragedy" used more often anyhow). An entire square mile of mud 10 to 40 feet thick wiped entire families and/or all their property from the face of the earth in an instance. Whatever you want to call it, it was pretty awful for everyone involved - including the rescuers.
If my next-door neighbor gets robbed or had their house burned down, that would be a big deal to our local little neighborhood. Someone in the next town over might sympathize, if they heard about it at all. It wouldn't get reported on the other side of the country. That's just the reality of life, and it's nothing to wring our hands over.
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Well said.
-Joe from Tulalip
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To summarize the summary: "The most striking finding is that...it was not extraordinary."
Not to belittle the loss of those involved but it's always a bit much that 43 dead in the US = catastrophe. If this had happened in Asia or Africa it wouldn't make the news unless hundreds or thousands had been killed.
Who cares what it's called? No one I know of is trying to compare this to the horrific losses in Japan after the tsunami, or other major disasters around the world. It was a big deal to us here in WA state (and I heard the terms "disaster" and "tragedy" used more often anyhow). An entire square mile of mud 10 to 40 feet thick wiped entire families and/or all their property from the face of the earth in an instance. Whatever you want to call it, it was pretty awful for everyone involved - including the rescuers.
If my next-door neighbor gets robbed or had their house burned down, that would be a big deal to our local little neighborhood. Someone in the next town over might sympathize, if they heard about it at all. It wouldn't get reported on the other side of the country. That's just the reality of life, and it's nothing to wring our hands over.
I'm in France and I'm reading about it on slashdot so it has actually made the news more or less globally.
It has nothing to do with sympathizing. I sympathize with the family of those involved.
The point that I was trying to make is that if the same thing happened outside the US then it almost certainly wouldn't make the news in the US at all, never mind being called a catastrophe.
And yes, the word matters because of the scope that it implies.
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Four furlongs and 8 chains, of if you prefer, four furlongs and 32 rods.
Just noticed your earlier comment... (Score:2)
Thanks
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Again, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One reason I'm criticizing Jane is precisely that I respect how difficult it is to be tg, and unlike Jane I feel like I "have an obligation to help them feel less uncomfortable with it" and that it's unquestionably better that tg is "becoming more socially acceptable." I get that nobody would choose to be tg, which means that their gender identities either legitimately conflict with their chromosomes or even that they're simply gender confused, as you say. This mea
a question.... (Score:3)
Re:a question.... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Deforestation is not the problem. The problem is the entire area is a natural slide area because of the soil type. People encroached on that slide area and expected it to be stable (much the same as they encroach on floodplains and barrier islands and wetlands).
No, what "caused" the loss of life more than anything was people moving into a high risk area.
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+1 if I had it. So often you hear about these "catastrophes" when it's people moving into dangerous areas. Like people on the East Coast and hurricanes.
These folks didn't "expect" the slide to be stable, they "hoped" it would be.
Re:a question.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually the group worst hit WAS in an area where they weren't supposed to be, but they had the attitude of damn gubmint can't tell me what to do. source [nbcnews.com] (among many). If you think these folks would have been worried about higher insurance rates you're almost as loony as they are =)
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You seem to be eliminating the most powerful tool in the box. The insurance should reflect the risk. Another tool is requiring FULL disclosure by realtors trying to sell such a structure. Lastly, build sensibly taking the risk into account. If you are building into a flood zone, require the structure to be elevated above the base flood elevation. If you are building in known hurric
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To be fair, if you look at the scale of that thing, what fell is far deeper than tree roots are going to go.
There was a landslide on my land a few years ago... actually just 50-100 meters from where I'm getting ready to build my house (but the terrain is different, that's a groundwater-infiltrated glacial till-underlain marsh while my house site is basalt bedrock). It's weird looking at pictures of this giant slide, how much it looks like a 20x bigger version of my little one, from the smooth, rimmed concho
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Suppose your landslipe was exactly a twentieth the mass and volume of the Oso one. Then your slide area would have about 2.7 less mass per surface area for roots to anchor. Get a large enough unstable a
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Trees suck up water that otherwise causes slides.
You're focusing on the wrong variable with surface area. Figure out water flows and how trees smooth those out.
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Which is a slippery slope argument (literally!).
Deforestation contributes to landslides and water runoff volume. It is not a magic bullet. Landslides might still occur if the land on top of the cliff hadn't been logged. But they would be less likely. And you would have nice old growth forests.
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Not just that, but the damage done to a forest floor after a fire will certainly contribute to water erosion. You think the folks in Manitou Springs are going to keep their sandbags at the ready for the next decade worth of Spring runoff?
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Yes, the destruction of trees through harvesting contributes to water runoff. Why do you think flash floods happen in treeless areas like Utah box canyons?
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Trees suck up water that otherwise causes slides.
Unless it rains a lot. You can increase the threshold a bit before a slide occurs, but big, unstable areas will slide sooner or later.
There's really only two ways to deal with landslide issues this big - disposable land use or get rid of the hillside.
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You could try river birch if you're subarctic.
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I had paperbark birch seeds, which are also pretty water tolerant (though not as much as river birch), but none sprouted - ironically I think the seeds were too wet when I stratified them (same with my maples). Isn't river birch (B. nigra) a warm-weather birch species? I've got some cuttings of random local birches from a neighbor but I have no clue whether any of them are water tolerant enough to take swampy ground. Also birches don't usually get that tall so I don't know how expansive of a root system the
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River birch survives just fine in my climate here in Northeastern Ohio, we average 1.5m of snowfall and regularly see -23C temperatures with dips about once a decade down to around -35C. We're at the extreme northern end of their range though so it would probably be a crap shoot as to whether it would grow.
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I don't live there, but looking at some of the photos, is deforestation potentially part of the problem?
Yes. Don't listen to the sibling comment, which ignores the well-known fact that deforestation in fact was a contributing factor. Of course, if you actually wanted to know the answer to your question, you would have found it with google, dozens of times over.
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When the disaster strikes, I can count on my good old Republican corporations to save me, because they will profit. Oh, wait.
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The 'pedia says that it's an ancient delta of glacial sand that was subsequently exposed to a lot of water flow, washing out the silt and clay, leaving just the loose sand and gravel with nothing to cement it together.
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Trees reduce the water flows. It's not the anchoring depth of the roots that matters, but the water retained by the large trees.
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Are trees supposed to eliminate the river at the bottom that's been eating away at the foundation of the slope?
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No, I don't think you have the physics right. Water flowing into the hill from the top down causes the slide. The river is far enough away from the cliff that your scenario doesn't happen.
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That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.
The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)
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I've been in that area. The river is far enough away from the sides of the valley that it isn't eroding the slope. In my observational opinion. The river went through flat land, at least several hundred yards away from the valley wall.
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I seriously doubt those areas were under sea level during the last ice age. Sea level was several hundred feet lower at the time. But glacial deposits + rain is a good enough reason for the slide to have occurred.
Some real estate valuations .... (Score:2)
It's possible to map ground contours using SAR [wikipedia.org] through vegetation. And it would be trivially easy to make property purchases conditional on a risk assesment of landslide conditions basd upon past slide activity. There goes the market for those cheap riverfront vacation properties.
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There goes the market for those cheap riverfront vacation properties.
There is a very good reason that some river front property is very cheap.
Well, this is a waste of time. (Score:3)
BTW, Last body found today (Score:2)
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... [bbc.com]