Willful ignorance of cause and effect led to 18 dead
and counting.
John Pennington, the emergency manager of Snohomish County. “It was considered very safe.” He said this on Monday, two days after the equivalent of three million dump truck loads of wet earth heaved down on the river near the tiny town of Oso. Unforeseen — except for 60 years’ worth of warnings, most notably a report in 1999 that outlined “the potential for a large catastrophic failure” on the very hillside that just suffered a large catastrophic failure.
It is human nature, if not the American way, to look potential disaster in the face and prefer to see a bright and shining lie. The “taming” of this continent, in five centuries and change, required a mighty mustering of cognitive dissonance. As a result, most of us live with the danger of wildfire, earthquake, tornado, flooding, drought, hurricane or yet-to-be-defined and climate-change-influenced superstorm. A legacy of settlement is the delusion that large-scale manipulation of the natural world can be done without consequence.
What happened when the earth moved on a quiet Saturday morning in the Stillaguamish Valley was foretold, in some ways, by the relationship that people have with that sylvan slice of the Pacific Northwest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/opinion/sunday/egan-at-home-when-the-earth-moves.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
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in an area above and adjacent to the slide area. The loggers were allowed 7.5 acres, but they pushed the boundaries a little; a common practice. From the picture it looks like the additional cut provided drainage right into the slide area, like funnel. That probably wouldn't have much bothered the folks living in Oso. Some of them probably worked in the woods themselves. And there's a kind of live free or die ethos that prevails out in that neck of the woods. I'm not saying they were complicit in their own destruction, just that that's the way it is.
