Every place has it's STOBOR.

STOBOR? Acronym or Heinlein?

Clear cutting appears to be part of the problem in this landslide. In fact clear cutting beyond the permit boundaries by a European owned company.

One can't always escape or mitigate other peoples actions.

It's partly because they aren't looking at an aerial view with an engineer or geologist's knowledge. Looking at the before picture, it's obvious that this is the next bite out of the cliff face. It will continue to do this until it reaches a profile where the strength of the soil can support the cliff. This one was bigger due to a "perfect storm" of conditions.

I see they just found the body of that missing four month old child. Heart breaking.

An acquaintance of mine in the local Red Cross introduced me to a saying years ago I would guess many here have heard ... "All disasters are local", so +1 on "Know Your Local Hazard Profile!"

Short of a major comet/asteroid impact level event or a supervolcano, generally true.


The above comment is not meant to imply that because an event is not local to me I'm removed from it.

I do feel bad for all those who are suffering directly from this and hope they can find some peace, eventually.

The TV news was just mentioning that the mud was 70 feet thick in some places. And it is contaminated with sewage and various chemicals. Makes for a tough recovery operation.

Yeah, an epic wall of mud. I read a report that said the volume of the slide contained three times the material of Hoover Dam, just to give an idea of the monumental scale of the disaster.

Three times Hoover Dam? That's a big dam, so that's a mind boggling amount of mud to search through. I presume that it would be very, very difficult to recover all the bodies in such a massive amount of material. A 9/11 Ground Zero-type response could do it, but I don't think those kinds of resources are available here.

I wonder--somewhere down the line, does a developer eventually grade the area and then build more housing on top of it??? It wouldn't surprise me, unfortunately.

More likely the county buys the land, they complete the search, do some regrading for safety and it becomes a county memorial park.