Building Blog has a good piece on the recent mudslides in LA, which in turn followed the denuding of the hills by raging bush-fires.
As one commenter notes, how anybody could think that a few concrete barricades would hold back a 50mph mudslide, embedded with boulders and other large debris, is hard to fathom.
(pics by Irfan Khan for the LA Times).
What is also hard to fathom is why people persist in building in obvious places of danger. And why they are allowed to. It’s a little like the people who move to the coastal regions of the SE US — it’s only a question of time before Bad Things happen to your house, but people lack the imaginative capacity to see that, or believe that it will happen to them.
For the title of this piece, I refer you to the first comment on the Building Blog entry which quotes this extract from the LA Times:
P. Michael Freeman, chief of the L.A. County Fire Department, acknowledged that crews were operating on weather forecasts that turned out to be incorrect. “I think it’s imperative that everybody understand the unpredictability of predictions,” Freeman said.
There’s a Video Guide to How Mudslides Work if you find it difficult to imagine how (basically, Slope + Loose Mud + Water = Disagreebleness x Lots).
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