La Conchita

[MAPNUT]

http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jeff/projects/la_conchita/airphotos/98photos.html

Pictures of La Conchita, CA taken in 1998. In particular, look at the upper left of the thumbnails.

I apologize if anyone is upset by my bringing this up, but the recent disaster was incredibly preventable. It sounds like everyone in the little town was aware that the hillside posed a problem, namely an immediate threat of death. The 1998 photo shows the remnant of a slide that destroyed some houses in 1995, but no one was hurt. But how can 250 people live there and ignore the danger? What goes on in their minds? What are the people thinking of who can't wait to move back?

One thing that occurs to me is that people could be trapped by a mortgage, if houses there became hard to sell after the 1995 slide. I can see how you could just hope for the best if you were faced with defaulting on your mortgage, or otherwise taking a huge financial loss. But somehow I don't think that's the case. The civil engineers I work with all agree that they wouldn't dream of buying a house in that town. Isn't the danger obvious to everyone though?

[teddyv]

I'd be interested to know if they could even get house (structural) insurance. Insurance companies should have already considered this a very high risk environment, with potential catastrophic loss of property and life.

[gethen]

I would also expect that, like people who live in hurricane risk areas, those living in La Conchita have trouble getting home owner's insurance.

[beskeptical]

I had similar thoughts about why would anyone live there. And the previous slide was supposedly not indicative of further risk. Well those 1998 pictures sure do look like multiple slide risks to me. There is even one where the hillside looks like it has partially slipped.

People are gullible but my guess is the developers were convincing the hill was stable. They probably even had their own land surveyors verify said hill stability.

It's sad.

[sarongsong]

"...Geologic evidence suggests that the 1995 landslide, and other landslide events along this section of coastline, are a relatively frequent occurrence..."
Assessing Landslide Hazard Over a 130-Year Period for La Conchita, California (http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jeff/projects/la_conchita/apcg2001_article/apcg2001_article.html)
September 2001
Department of Geography
University of California Santa Barbara

[MAPNUT]

I do at least feel badly for the man who lost his wife and three children. I read that he had been worried about the hill and had just decided to evacuate, but didn't do so in time.

[beskeptical]

I feel especially badly for the kids who had no say in the choice of home location.

It is sad when anyone is hurt or dies whether or not it was preventable and whether or not someone who was the victim made the bad choice.

[lyford]

This happened a few miles down the road from my wife's work. We live about 20 miles south off the 101.

There are several little "towns" along the cliffs between Ventura and Santa Barbara. You can tell from the satellite pic that the 101 hugs the coastline between the Pacific and the cliff sides. The houses squeeze into land right at the base of the cliff.

The ground is easily eroded all along the coast side, stretching down to the Pallisades in Santa Monica. Landslides are inevitable. You can see the evidence of them everywhere.

What is tragic is that earlier in the morning a smaller mudslide happened in La Conchita, closing the freeway. I think everyone thought - oh, that's it - and went back to not worrying. That really should have been a sign to get out in the next few hours...

Here are pics from the earlier slide:

http://www.opl.ucsb.edu/grace/lc/lc12.html

That page was made after the first slide but before the second.

This has affected some friends who have been stranded since the freeway closed, but that is the extent of our personal involvement. (Closing the 101 turned a half hour commute into a 6-8 hour one way trip... It's really the only highway.) I can just imagine the grief that of that one man who went out for ice cream and lost his whole family. Then I remember that you have to mulitply this story by about 3 or 4 orders of magnitude when you think of the human impact of the tsunami. Unreal.....

[lyford]

Here is a site that shows the entire California coast, pretty cool.

http://www.californiacoastline.org/

You can see the cliffs in the La Conchita area before the slide:

La Conchita (http://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/image.cgi?image=200405056&mode=sequential&flags=0& year=current)

Not sure if this is the exact area, but it's close.

[kleindoofy]

... But how can 250 people live there and ignore the danger? What goes on in their minds? ...

The real problem is: how could a town issue building permits for that area? This is also what happened along the Mississippi a few years back: Since really high floods don't happen all that often, the towns issued permits for land in the flood plains thinking that nothing would happen. We should know better now, shouldn't we? Well, it's not going to happen. If a short term profit can be made, it will be.

Isn't there an atomic energy plant on the San Andreas Fault? Get out while you can! :o

[Moose]

But how can 250 people live there and ignore the danger? What goes on in their minds? What are the people thinking of who can't wait to move back?

One thing that occurs to me is that people could be trapped by a mortgage, if houses there became hard to sell after the 1995 slide.

The civil engineers I work with all agree that they wouldn't dream of buying a house in that town. Isn't the danger obvious to everyone though?

Perhaps, but if you're in that sort of situation and actually do want to leave, who are you going to sell the house to? If you do manage to sell the house and leave, that means that someone else is now faced with the situation you're in.

For many of these people, there are only two options: 1) hope for the best, or 2) abandon the house altogether, and try to finish off the remainder of that mortgage while simultaneously trying to afford housing elsewhere.

Remember, the banks are not going to write off those mortgages just because the houses were destroyed and may be uninsured. On the contrary. Without the houses as collateral, it wouldn't surprise me if, in a few months to let the media attention settle down, the banks start calling in those debts. Read the small print on their loan contracts. They can do that at will.

[sarongsong]

...Isn't there an atomic energy plant on the San Andreas Fault? Get out while you can! :o
San Andreas Fault (http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/earthq3/where.html)
Diablo Canyon and San Onofre Nuclear Power Plants (http://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/captionlist.cgi?searchstr=nuclear+power+plant&flag s=0).
Not to worry---the government makes iodine pills available (http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/1517805/detail.html) to us living within 10 miles of them. :P

[Gillianren]

in Altadena, CA, there is a canyon called Eaton Canyon. because it's in the San Gabriel Mountains, the world's most unstable mountain range, it's also a wash--all the water from that part of the mountains goes down into the canyon during those rare occasions when it rains. it ends in a roughly bowl-shaped place known locally as the Eaton Canyon Wash.

when my mother was a child, someone built a restaurant in it.

blessedly, the restaurant was closed when it was destroyed by flooding, but the punch line is that the guy wanted to rebuild in the same place. he literally couldn't find an insurance company anywhere in the world that would insure him.

[beskeptical]

Here is a site that shows the entire California coast, pretty cool.

http://www.californiacoastline.org/

You can see the cliffs in the La Conchita area before the slide:

La Conchita (http://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/image.cgi?image=200405056&mode=sequential&flags=0& year=current)

Not sure if this is the exact area, but it's close.What a great link!!!

[lyford]

Here is a site that shows the entire California coast, pretty cool.
http://www.californiacoastline.org/
You can see the cliffs in the La Conchita area before the slide:
La Conchita (http://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/image.cgi?image=200405056&mode=sequential&flags=0& year=current)
Not sure if this is the exact area, but it's close.What a great link!!!

Well, they have gotten flack from both the Homeland Security (http://www.californiacoastline.org/concerns.html) folks AND Barbara Streisand, (http://www.californiacoastline.org/streisand/lawsuit.html) so they must be doing something right!

Between that and Terraserver, (http://www.terraserver.com/) you have a whole evening's entertainment!:wink:

[beskeptical]

I like the terraserver too. Thanks for sharing. :D