Deep Denial

You have probably at this point seen something about the immense landslide that buried portions of the small western Washington town of Oso.

I should say here that while I didn't know this specific locality or the geology of the particular hillside involved that the news didn't really surprise me. And that, frankly, it shouldn't have surprised anyone else, including the people in the little town that woke up last week to find themselves very much dead.

Tim Egan has a good summary of the geology and the politics behind the deaths here. I can't really do much better at describing why these people were buried than he does:

"...who wants to listen to warnings by pesky scientists, to pay heed to predictions by environmental nags, or allow an intrusive government to limit private property rights? That’s how these issues get cast. And that’s why reports like the ones done on the Stillaguamish get shelved. The people living near Oso say nobody ever informed them of the past predictions."

As Egan points out the "problem" is not the science. We knew what happened, why it happened, and why it was damn likely to happen. The geology is pretty straightforward; western Washington (and parts of western Oregon but the Puget glaciation makes things an order of magnitude or three worse in WA...) combines steep terrain, lots of water, and weak substrate into a deck full of pretty deadly cards.

Throw in clearcut logging and you have a real wildcard in the deck.

No. The "problem" was and is really the suite of massive problems surrounding the politics of this region and of a hell of a lot of the way we Americans think in general.

First, a whole lot of rural western WA is pretty much logging and nothing else. If you close, or limit, the logging in the steep timberlands around these little towns then little towns like this Oso just flat-out die anyway. Only without the, you know, actual dying.

And then there's the question of "private property rights". A hell of a lot of the sorts of people who live in this little town, including the ones now buried under a shit-ton of hardening landslide debris, believed that they had the absolute right, and that the timber companies had the absolute right, to do absolutely whatever they wanted to do on "their" lands. And that to do anything to change, or stop, those people and companies doing those things was wrong.

So that while a whole hell of a lot of people knew that this hillside was unstable, and that logging around it was problematic at best, and that the possibility for the whole goddamn thing to move downhill on top of these people's houses was not so much a question of "if" as "when"...nobody actually pushed someone to do anything about that.

In this case the nobodies and someones involved would have had to accept that 1) there are limits, and deadly sharp, critical, limits on our human ability to fuck about with natural systems, and 2) that it is in humans' best interests to have an overall authority - let's call it "government" because, really, what the hell - to define and enforce restrictions on that human activity before it crosses those limits.

And rural western WA and a hell of a lot of today's United States is full of people who accept neither 1) nor 2).

So this one falls under the general heading of, what's the quote, something like "The willingness of someone not to believe something is directly related to how critical it is to their perceived self-interest not to believe it."?

They saw their self-interest as "private property rights" and "limited government" and not "natural hazards" or "regulation".

In order to believe that they had to deny that this could happen.

And then one morning their denial rose up and buried them deep.

The Rains Come...To Fuck You Up

Now and then I may complain about the rain during our Dark Ages, but our rains don't come like this:

That kind of rain doesn't just keep you indoors and give you the wintertime blues.

It kills you.

It destroys your crops and starves you to death. It gives you typhoid fever and dysentery and liver fluke. It rips your nipa house apart and scatters your life across the wreckage of your fields.

There are reasons to complain about living in the United States. Don't get me wrong. Those of us not in the two-yacht families get reamed pretty hard sometimes.

But not often like this.

Half a word

Every so often the Earth likes to remind us that for all our hubris we're still just hairless monkeys with homicidal tendencies. And that for REAL destruction, Mother Earth is one BAD motherfucker.And the quote of the day so far (from Nancy Nall): "I wept because I had three inches of new, wet snow in my driveway, and then I met a man who had 12 feet of Pacific Ocean in his."

عناقيد الغضب

I can't imagine this is a good thing.When I was in the MFO-Sinai back in the 1980's one of the missions we were tasked with was escorting Egyptian mineclearing teams in the US Sector. This was one of those dangerous-but-boring things that soldiers do a lot of, peacetime or wartime, and we used to spend a lot of time sitting in the white quarter-ton jeep, the lieutenant, the RTO, and the medic (which was me), talking about anything and everything to pass the time, both to try and ignore the fact that the Egyptians were tossing the damn things around (which was part of their mineclearing "technique") as well as to kill the long stretches where the Egyptians were doing nothing at all (which was another part of their "technique").

At any rate, one long afternoon the Egyptians piled up a truly mountainous pile of mines, everything from US M-21 antitank mines left by the Israelis through cheap n' nasty wooden PMD-type shoebox mines left by the Egyptians themselves. It was a hell of a monument to the hatred between the two nations as well as a reminder of how many times the place we were in had been fought over. But the sight made Lt. Parker, who was a pretty good military historian, ruminate on wars in general and Middle Eastern wars in particular.

I still remember him shading his eyes as he watched the Egyptians wire the massive pile of useless junk for demo.

"It's pretty amazing how many reasons that people around here can find to kill each other." he said, "Land, oil, religion. Fucking amazing."

He thought about this for a moment, and then added;

"But when they start fighting over water...that's when it's really gonna get brutal."

So who knows - we may not have seen the worst the Middle East has to offer.

Yet.

(cross-posted from MilPub; the title of the post, BTW, is supposed to be the Arabic for "The Grapes of Wrath")

This in from the traffic desk...

Sinkhole in Guatemala City:Buffy Summers: Now, we can do this the hard way or... well, actually, there's just the hard way.
Darla: That's fine with me.
Buffy Summers: Are you sure? Now this is not gonna be pretty. We're talking violence, strong language, adult content.
Two thoughts: Traffic through this part of town is pretty much hosed.

And I wonder who has the contract for providing the City of Guatemala City with backfill? And is it too late to get a bid in?

You know you're fucked when...

...a giant hurricane comes roaring up your lobby.Great holy crying baby Jesus, look at the freaking size of it.

Because this is America and history is what was on "CSI" last night and ancient history is what was in the newspaper Monday, most of us have probably never heard of the great Hurricane of 1900.

But Galveston is remembering.