Comment Every state has its hazards... (Score 2) 230
Western Washington has millions of people living in slide zones, living on old slide deposits, living in front of future slides. It's easy to point to one active slide area and say 'damn fools shouldn't have lived there' but the reality is that we live in the shadow of glaciers from the recent past that resulted in widespread deposits of soupy soil. Western Washington is also a high-hazard area for huge earthquakes, as are many parts of California. Do people expect everyone to move? Or what about Oklahoma or Kansas in the path of tornadoes? Or Minnesotans subject to stinging blizzards and arctic chill? Or...? You get the idea. You try and identify the hazards, mitigate them, and warn of them. In the case of the Oso landslide, there never should have been clearcut logging above the slide-prone area, there should have been monitoring of the water levels, and there should have been drainage mitigations installed years ago...as there have been in many other similar areas including just up the road from Oso. So...don't tell people to move until you're prepared to tell Californians or Oklahomans or English or Japanese or whoever to move.