What do you know. Deregulation of business does hurt people.

"De"regulation? TFA implies that regulation was increased after landslides in the 1980s.

It was a 100 year storm, don't worry, nothing like this will happen again in our lifetimes.

And livin in the northwest (outside of base camp puget sound) means either being a tree hugger or a logger, no room for compromise here.

submitter:mudslides

The dirt, the drink, or the poop?

I was really confused until I realized the headline wasn't talking about the beverage.

B-b-b-but Clinton...

Oh Noes!

Add submitter to the list of people whose headline is the exact opposite of what the article says.

The article says they started regulating it in the 80s precisely to stop this. State foresters apparently just got lazy about physically inspecting sites before approval.

Mmmmm, mudslides...

No, excessive rains caused the mudslides. All the regulations in the world are not going to protect you from acts of nature exceeding an inch of rain per hour for an extended period. The perfect regulations to keep you safe from these acts of nature would be to prohibit you from being anywhere near the range of consequences of such extreme elements.

Cripes, people!
Destruction of our environment is important. Until we completely destroy all of our natural resources & make this planet unbearable to live upon, we'll never build giant generational spaceships & explore the galaxy!

Is the link to the wrong article or something?

70% of the mudslides occurred in areas that were completely forested and untouched by loggers. In this case regulations failed to keep you safe by allowing you to live near those areas.

holy shiat! you mean when you destroy all the vegetation in a given area the top soil begins to erode? I HAD NO IDEA!

We are having this same debate here in Jefferson County, West Virginia. In our case, it's Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland transplants who move to a remote, forested ridge and the first thing they want to do is clearcut their property and plant grass and tidy shrubs.

Apparently you have to be really, really sheltered not to realize that grass is not going to grow in this soil, clearcut or not, and every tree you cut is another pound or two of your property that will go bye-bye every time it rains hard. The amount of erosion from clearing up here turns the Shenandoah brown for days after every storm. For a good example, look at this photo (pops).

There's a new draft zoning ordinance that aims to restrict clearing of trees in the sloped parts of the county east of the river, but the anti-zoning forces just won a huge concession in getting language changed to allow removal of any tree less than three inches in diameter, even in portions of a lot designated as "undisturbed". That sounds like a small tree, but a typical three-inch-wide tree is anywhere from 10 to 20 years old, and trees of that size are a large portion of the tree cover on a typical wooded lot. In other words uninformed homeowners can now legally do a ton (literally) of damage that will take decades to fix.

acchief:No, excessive rains caused the mudslides. All the regulations in the world are not going to protect you from acts of nature exceeding an inch of rain per hour for an extended period. The perfect regulations to keep you safe from these acts of nature would be to prohibit you from being anywhere near the range of consequences of such extreme elements.

You should probably go ahead and study up on what happens when you combine higher than expected rainfall with a decrease in the ability of the ground to absorb moisture that comes as a byproduct of sprawling concrete housing developments and deforestation/defoliation which leaves hard packed dirt to replace the normally dense foliage that used to absorb and diffuse the effects of rainfall.

But that would probably be more effort than spouting off like a farking imbecile, so carry on.

It was not deregulation, but lax enforcement by the state coupled with lying and cheating by the logging company that created this mess.
If the law had teeth that would require the offending company to pay for the damage, both to the state and to the people who had their water source destroyed, this probably would never happen again.

acchief: No, excessive rains caused the mudslides.

FTA: 87 of the steepest sites that had been clear-cut. Nearly half of them suffered landslides during the storm. Those sites represented less than 8 percent of the total acreage[...] But the sites produced about 30 percent - 219 - of the landslides.

No, clear-cutting did. If excessive rain was the cause then the landslides would've occur as frequently in areas that weren't clear-cut.

It is a combination of things. I was in Seattle when the storm hit. It was a really bad one from what a lot of the news outlets were saying when compared to other storms from previous years. Yeah, the logging did not help either making conditions worse. The only way this could have been prevented would have been to have huge retaining walls that no one would finance.

The government should have done their job better, and that might have made the problem a bit better.

What deregulation? The article makes clear that the cause of the problems is lack of enforcement of existing regulations. You can pass all the laws you want, but if some slackass government employee doesn't get out from behind his desk to make sure they're acted upon, those laws might as well not exist.

Subby's headline is proof that people read what they want to believe. TFA says "State forestry rules empower the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to restrict logging on unstable slopes..." This is a government failure. So, when government fails... we need more government???

Thud'nBlunder:It was not deregulation, but lax enforcement by the state coupled with lying and cheating by the logging company that created this mess.
If the law had teeth that would require the offending company to pay for the damage, both to the state and to the people who had their water source destroyed, this probably would never happen again.

This.

The law should be changed so that companies have to take out multi million dollar insurance plans that a mudslide won't happen due to their cutting. Let the market sort this out.

If there's more regulations there's just going to be more payoffs to government officials or, as in this case, no enforcement of the existing laws.

Subby, here's an idea, read the article.

Close enough for government work.

Sounds like regulation is still happening, the regulators just stopped watching. The funny thing is when too much regulation happens there are increased forest fires (Look at the western fires of the last few years.)

MyRandomName:Sounds like regulation is still happening, the regulators just stopped watching. The funny thing is when too much regulation happens there are increased forest fires (Look at the western fires of the last few years.)

soooo....the only think that could possibly make forest fires rise is over-regulation?

i can make a similar correlation between the assassination of JFK and the rise in the number of mcdonalds restaurants during that period.

lelio:
The law should be changed so that companies have to...
If there's more regulations there's just going to be...

We need more regulations because regulations are bad!

MentalMoment:acchief: No, excessive rains caused the mudslides.

FTA: 87 of the steepest sites that had been clear-cut. Nearly half of them suffered landslides during the storm. Those sites represented less than 8 percent of the total acreage[...] But the sites produced about 30 percent - 219 - of the landslides.

No, clear-cutting did. If excessive rain was the cause then the landslides would've occur as frequently in areas that weren't clear-cut.

i didnt kill that family.......the company that made the bullets killed them.


i cant believe that anyone could be stupid enough to blame the weather for erosion of a clear-cut area.

talk about your apologetics.

Weyerhauser is not to blame. How were they to know that it would rain here in WA?

piperTom: Subby's headline is proof that people read what they want to believe. TFA says "State forestry rules empower the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to restrict logging on unstable slopes..." This is a government failure. So, when government fails... we need more government???

Obviously the solution is more logging companies ignoring the law.

schattenteufel:Cripes, people!
Destruction of our environment is important. Until we completely destroy all of our natural resources & make this planet unbearable to live upon, we'll never build giant generational spaceships & explore the galaxy!

the first logical comment in this whole thread.


earth, what a hellhole! i'll take my chances up here with the things.

DrForrester:Weyerhauser is not to blame. How were they to know that it would rain here in WA?

Weyerhauser is a very important link in the effort to uglify washington.

go clearcut somewhere else.

Mara Lake British Columbia, about 10 years ago. Major amount of debris comes down the mountain side and gives the lake many new floaters(logging debris). The reason?? Culverts were to small and a lake formed behind it and then released a shiat load of water. Subdivision below gets lots of nice new landscaping of smaller rocks and sand.
And then every culvert, even on the highways, were checked, or lost ones found, or replaced to a larger size.

somehow i just read that as "mustaches"

/funnier that way

deadapostle:Oh Noes!

mmmmm

Mother Nature knows best.

i cant believe that anyone could be stupid enough to blame the weather for erosion of a clear-cut area.

talk about your apologetics.

My mistake. I assumed everyone here had already had a grasp of elementary school math. Or at least a basic grasp of statistics.

Also your analogy sounds like you're comparing the clear-cutters as the criminal who pulled the trigger and claiming all blame on the intimate object.

Submitter and article have apparently never met.

It's interesting to me, though, that those that always turn to new regulations never seem to think about how hard it is to enforce the millions already on the books...

This is the Tragedy of the Commons.
The loggers are working near parklands owned by the government, which of course does not take proper care of its land. If they working near privately-owned parklands, the owners would never permit such wanton environmental destruction.

The government will never protect lands like private owners would.

Anyone else read the article as mustelids and not mudslides?

/they're illegal to keep as pets in CA

MentalMoment:i cant believe that anyone could be stupid enough to blame the weather for erosion of a clear-cut area.

talk about your apologetics.

My mistake. I assumed everyone here had already had a grasp of elementary school math. Or at least a basic grasp of statistics.

Also your analogy sounds like you're comparing the clear-cutters as the criminal who pulled the trigger and claiming all blame on the intimate object.

i love how you put forth these premises to negate my premises but still fail to put forth any sort of thing loosely related to anything that might be construed as a fact.

maybe you should scoot on back to the drawing board, n00b.

What deregulation? FTA, the government is up the lumber industry's butt to the elbow. My guess is that by allowing so much regulation, the lumber industry is shielded from liability to some extent. This is the norm in many other industries. Once again, the problem is with too much government, not the lack of government.

NeoKhan:This is the Tragedy of the Commons.
The loggers are working near parklands owned by the government, which of course does not take proper care of its land. If they working near privately-owned parklands, the owners would never permit such wanton environmental destruction.

The government will never protect lands like private owners would.

western washington has a special problem though....it's called weyerhauser and it makes all the most beautiful places in the state into crapholes. people here that dont live in clearcut states like wa lack a basic understanding of not being able to go camping without seeing clearcuts all over the place.

in wwa you either hate it or you're making money from it.

Kensey,

WV needs to start telling people from out of state to go screw themselves. All they do is destroy what little it has left.

MentalMoment:i cant believe that anyone could be stupid enough to blame the weather for erosion of a clear-cut area.

talk about your apologetics.

My mistake. I assumed everyone here had already had a grasp of elementary school math. Or at least a basic grasp of statistics.

Also your analogy sounds like you're comparing the clear-cutters as the criminal who pulled the trigger and claiming all blame on the intimate object.

What do dildos have to do with anything?

State forestry rules empower the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to restrict logging on unstable slopes when landslides could put public resources or public safety at risk.

But in Little Mill Creek and elsewhere in the Upper Chehalis basin, a Seattle Times investigation found that Weyerhaeuser frequently clear-cut on unstable slopes, with scant oversight from the state geologists who are supposed to help watchdog the timber industry.

Sounds like the DNR has been farking up and not enforcing it's own rules. This has nothing to do with deregulation submittard.
-1/10 for trolling headline.

re-elect_jimmy_carter:
western washington has a special problem though....it's called weyerhauser and it makes all the most beautiful places in the state into crapholes. people here that dont live in clearcut states like wa lack a basic understanding of not being able to go camping without seeing clearcuts all over the place.

in wwa you either hate it or you're making money from it.

Sorry, late to the thread...but THIS..very well said.

Amazing isn't it? What you DON'T read in newspapers speaks VOLUMES.
Same thing for these "devastating" stories of those affected by huricanes, floods etc...you live near a river, or near a coast, expect it to be blown away by a hurricane, or washed away by a flood. Sh*t happens! Don't blame the government, unless you want to blame them for letting you build in that area in the first place.


acchief:70% of the mudslides occurred in areas that were completely forested and untouched by loggers. In this case regulations failed to keep you safe by allowing you to live near those areas.

Mongo cut wood:State forestry rules empower the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to restrict logging on unstable slopes when landslides could put public resources or public safety at risk.

But in Little Mill Creek and elsewhere in the Upper Chehalis basin, a Seattle Times investigation found that Weyerhaeuser frequently clear-cut on unstable slopes, with scant oversight from the state geologists who are supposed to help watchdog the timber industry.

Sounds like the DNR has been farking up and not enforcing it's own rules. This has nothing to do with deregulation submittard.
-1/10 for trolling headline.

not that i disagree with your point but...pot...kettle...etc.