Fires,Floods,Landslides? (Spokane, Snoqualmie, Oso: houses, tornado, live)

[OneTimeSEALover]

We all know this is the "normal climate". Just listen to the news. So what will this "normal climate" hold for Washington this year? Fires? Avalanches? Floods? Landslides? All of the above? I wonder if it is possible for every one of these to strike. Will Amtrak and the commercial railroads be facing tracks covered with hillside? Will hot temperatures fill up all the streams and spread over the countryside? And in SPITE of all this, will wildfires rage? I seem to remember some fires were poorly fought because of firefighter shortage or firefighter fatigue. The people who shrug about climate probably don't see themselves out their filling sandbags or fighting runaway fires. But when you "civilize" territory as we late-comers have done, shifts in the weather have inescapable consequences. The news could be full of them in the spring and summer.

[Haakon]

All of them happen somewhere every year in WA. Every year there are fires in eastern WA, every year there are mud slides that block train tracks, every year there are rivers that flood - the Snoqualmie normally floods multiple times a year.

[OneTimeSEALover]

Well, yeah, somewhere in Washington. But it makes more sense to talk about where the population is concentrated. I come a long time ago from Spokane. Lots of things that make national news hardly ever happened there. So I'm really addressing the locales for the all-purpose disaster scenario. Did landslides block trains east of the Cascades? And the whole thing about climate is not ever about "what never happened before". It is about severity and casualty loss and things like that. Take the whole history of the Earth and nothing at all is new.

[Hemlock140]

Yes, minor flooding, landslides and fires, Somme pretty big happen every year, just like most places. Where we have lived for 24 years, however, there has been only the occasional windstorm, with broken branches to clean up, never anything damaging. You just have to choose your location well.

[StealthRabbit]

nothing to fear, nothing out of ordinary, just another yr (tho wet and cold) in the PNW.

We are having another Ice Storm tonight and predicted through early March (previously restricted to mid January at late date)

I'm sure the RR crews are clearing mudslides daily, tho a really big one could occur in 5 min.
Maybe another volcano is brewing (Previous one is <40 miles from me)

Friends are placing sandbags tonight (another BIG rain today) Our local river is up about 10ft this week. (not like my TX property, where river rose 40 ft in 2 days, or my Colorado location where river rose 30 ft in 1 hr. (Canyon) The Big Thompson - The Coloradoan - www.coloradoan.com 40 yrs ago, but (3) 500 yr floods since.

Stuff happens,

If you like to worry, move to NW WY or much of 'geothermal' ID!

One GIANT frack expected any day.

[Sockeye66]

Fires shouldn't be a big issue this year with the past two years having plenty of rain and snow. Landslides are a different story.

[notnamed]

We've had a fun year in SW WA. Floods, foot of snow, landslides, and even a tornado last spring.

[OneTimeSEALover]

Originally Posted by Sockeye66

Fires shouldn't be a big issue this year with the past two years having plenty of rain and snow. Landslides are a different story.

"Shouldn't" A lot of stuff "shouldn't" happen and does anyway. That's why a lot of headlines occur. "Why, that isn't what one would have expected". Most of what happens is annoying and occasionally expensive. Like Oso. That "shouldn't have happened". A lot of documentaries came out of that landslide. Surveyors now know there are signs of other landslides. Oso was settled in the pattern it was because no one TOLD the residents of these past occurrences. I'm pretty sure the coming year will prompt further studies which won't be done till homes are covered and people are dead. That's our kind of civilization.

[PS90]

Originally Posted by OneTimeSEALover

"Shouldn't" A lot of stuff "shouldn't" happen and does anyway. That's why a lot of headlines occur. "Why, that isn't what one would have expected". Most of what happens is annoying and occasionally expensive. Like Oso. That "shouldn't have happened". A lot of documentaries came out of that landslide. Surveyors now know there are signs of other landslides. Oso was settled in the pattern it was because no one TOLD the residents of these past occurrences. I'm pretty sure the coming year will prompt further studies which won't be done till homes are covered and people are dead. That's our kind of civilization.

I'm not sure that I'm getting your point, but one thing to keep in mind is that it is often only when a landslide takes out a bunch of houses, or suddenly a wildfire burns close to a residential area, that it becomes big news.

However, most of these natural "disasters" are not actually any worse than they were 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years ago, it's just that there are WAY more homes taking up WAY more space than they ever have, so it's WAY more likely that a natural disaster is going to affect someone than ever before. Wildfires for example, are often only mentioned in the media when they threaten towns or homes - if it's out in the middle if nowhere, burning-up sagebrush, it barely gets a mention. So now that there's a lot more homes and a lot less sagebrush, suddenly every big fire is close to a house somewhere, and therefore becomes a "disaster".

[OneTimeSEALover]

Well, THAT really helps! So society is NO better off than 10,000 years ago. Thank you VERY MUCH, western science!