One heavy rainstorm could do it.
That’s geology for you–it doesn’t conform to the time sense of little skittery mammals on the surface.
The “state officials” saying that a few rocks are going to land in the quarry or on the road are completely insane. And building a barrier won’t work either, unless it looks a lot like the Hoover Dam. This is not a surface slide. If you look at the link from Bo, focus on the bottom left hand side of the 3-photo time lapse. See that bulge moving forward? That’s the base of the wedge that’s about to start accelerating.
Reports are that fissures are 250 feet deep and growing. As rain seeps into those cracks, and the cold gets in to those deep areas to further contract the material that’s been 80+ degrees for the last several thousand years, the scenario will change drastically. Also, the basalt they are counting on has been shaken and vibrated by quarry blasts for how many years? There’s no way it is still solid enough to anchor the lower material.
I can’t see what the geologists are banking on when they say it won’t accelerate again. I wish they were telling us more about what they basing that opinion on.
And from what I can see on google maps, this only has to go about 2000 feet to cover rt. 82, dam the river, and bury rt. 97 as well.
If the really want to prepare, they should start on widening Konnowac Pass road. It’s about to get a whole lot busier. If I lived there, I’d be using it already.
I did find this comforting:
And finally, for the “Pitch Drop” addicts jonesing for a new one, here’s a Rattlesnake Ridge Web Cam.
Apparently there was new activity this morning.
The first picture they have is really cool.
How does this affect property rights, I wonder. At the base of the slide is a quarry, right; does all that dirt and rock sliding into the quarry become theirs to sell if they wish to? If it does become theirs, does that mean they’re responsible to pay to have it removed if they can’t sell it? It’d be a hell of a business model, a quarry that keeps filling back up again. I would expect there are probably laws that govern what happens when some object falls from one person’s property to another’s, but do those laws still hold when it’s the very land that’s moving?
All of that presupposes that the hillside and the quarry are owned by different people, which may not be the case here. But does anybody know any general answers to those questions?