Be afraid

[jhetley]

Well, FEMA teams are spreading out across the North Country, assessing damage from our floods...

(Water level down below flood stage in almost all areas.  But some people are griping that nobody told them that they were buying a house in a flood plain.  What part of "waterfront" don't you understand?)

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

(Water level down below flood stage in almost all areas. But some people are griping that nobody told them that they were buying a house in a flood plain. What part of "waterfront" don't you understand?)

*sigh* That one is eternal. I've seen properties built in some of the most absurd places. (Even aside from the time-honored old practice of slapping malls and housing developments all over the prime agricultural valley-bottom land.)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

There's a reason I bought a house half a mile from the water and 50 feet above high tide level.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Okay, there's this wide flat area about five feet above the water level in the river. What do you suppose caused that?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

We're more like a quarter mile, but 100 feet up. When we were house-shopping, I can recall looking at some places, looking at the river or a feeder creek, and saying "No thanks." It isn't, as they say, brain surgery.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There's miles of cliffside bluffs in and around Pacifica, California. The bluffs have large amounts of recent broken rock and other rubble along the bottom, and houses built along the top. What, the cliff edge is sthirty feet closer to your house now than when you bought it? You don't say?

And then there's all the houses in Boulder Creek and Scott's Valley cantilevered off of steep hillsides on wooden pilings bedded into ... well, dirt. Dirt on a steep hillside in an area that gets lots of rain in winter, and where every winter there are fresh mudslides that sometimes close two of the three roads in and out. And usually at least once in any wet winter, someone's house comes down along with a mudslide. And they rebuild ... the same way, in the same spot.

I find myself reminded of the remark, concerning "horse sense", that a horse will run back into a burning barn.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

A lot of otherwise-devout people need to be reminded that there is sound real-world advice as well as parable in "Build not your house upon the sand..."

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

I saw the same thing when I lived in Oregon, especially with idiots who bought houses along the Willamette River. I regularly heard "I know we were told that we were in a fifty-year floodplain, but I thought that meant we wouldn't get a flood for fifty years!"

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup. We're a half mile from the lake and a hundred meters above it. There's a small creek about fifty yards from the house, but it's a good thirty or forty feet downhill. We could conceivably get cut off, IF the lake rose enough to flood NH11 and enough other key roads washed out, but realistically, even if both icecaps and every glacier on the planet melted, and it all fell as rain in New Hampshire, the water wouldn't rise enough to flood us out.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

One of the best things about living in Dallas is that we're constantly reminded of why it's a dumb idea to build stuff alongside riverbanks and creekbeds. We have a lot of greenbelt parks running through the city, and every once in a while, we'll get some SMU brat who figures that this is a great place to build. When he's told by the city that he can't build there, he throws a tantrum and screams about the city restricting his rights to make obscene profits from real estate. Then we get a good summer gullywasher, that whole flat area is under about five feet of water, and the SMU brat quietly disappears and builds somewhere else.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

You didn't buy the science of WATERWORLD?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There was science in Waterworld? ;)

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Heh. I actually used that quotation in a newspaper feature I wrote, oh, 28 years ago about how the Pacific was undermining certain luxury beachfront homes on a particular sand spit almost as fast as they were being built.

Today, the beachfront where they stood is well underwater, and all traces of the houses are gone. But guess what: I just read that new condos are going up on the *new* beachfront.

*headdesk*

[kightp.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I moved to the Willamette Valley in 1978. We've had two "50-year" floods since then, and one 100-year flood.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

50 + 50 + 100...

I didn't know you were that old. Ever thought of contacting the Howards?

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

I moved out there in 1996, right after the big flood that took out Tillamook. When the flooding started again in 1997, when we had the 333 straight days of precipitation, I was laughing myself sick both at the wankers who bought those canalside houses just south of Portland, who were threatening to sue somebody for their building houses on 50-year floodplains, and at the twits who built houses up in the Tualatin Mountains that were watching their hillside houses wash down the side of the mountain in the rain. It was when the developers were pushing for building up the side of Mount Hood that I stopped laughing: I was working at the time for the Bureau of Land Management, and I couldn't help but notice that the two big pyroclastic flows from Hood to the north and south of Portland left a big channel straight into the middle of the city. When I asked what sort of evacuation plan Portland had if in case Hood started erupting again and was told "There isn't one," and discovered that this was deliberate so as not to scare off the newbies buying up houses and condos in the area, I had an additional impetus to get the hell out.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I believe that is the only known way to outrun a pyroclastic flow. "Best defense, not be there."