• Wahots
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    5 hours ago

    Honestly, what exactly do you do if the parcel of land where your home used to be caves away in a landslide? Do you still have ownership rights on the slide area? (Or a riverbed moves on your parcel, or the land is washed away in a hurricane)

  • regrub@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    That poor millionaire. Hopefully they have a second house they can stay at.

    • kamenLady.@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I think nature’s still in the slightly giving hints phase. But i also think a point was made here. Nature is like making the point, that there won’t be a last man standing, after it’s done with us humans.

      • Burninator05@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Unfortunately a not insignificant number of people in the US think the LA fires are God’s punishment for the nations semi-tollerance of trans people so we won’t be able to take the hints.

        • sudo42@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          Wait, I thought God was punishing us for the gays? Or was it masturbation? Pre-marital sex? Why not punish us for murder or greed or theft? Or letting so many people go hungry and homeless?

          /s

  • buttfarts@lemy.lol
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    1 day ago

    The parched hillsides with sparse vegetation don’t accommodate many tonnes of water being dumped onto them from the air.

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      Ultrahot fires these days tends to loosen up the top foot or two of soil both through root burnout and pure thermal expansion. I know in the burn areas near my house, if you go out a month after the fire your boots will practically disappear in dry topsoil flour. Add literally any water and it turns into soup.

      • weariedfae@sh.itjust.works
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        11 hours ago

        The topsoil becomes hydrophobic for a time due to the vaporized oils in plants and a bunch of physics I am fuzzy on. This means they’re less likely to absorb any water during the next rains after a wildfire and you get what are called post-wildfire debris flows (a type of mass wasting/landslide). They’re so predictable that planning for them and predicting where they will occur is a regular part of wildfire response in certain states.

        Your boots may sink into soup and add any sort of slope and that hillside is going down.

  • ElcaineVolta@kbin.melroy.org
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    1 day ago

    https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/

    amazing link I just finished reading, didn’t realize until the end it’s like 30 years old

    “Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.

    • rhythmisaprancer@moist.catsweat.com
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      1 day ago

      That’s pretty interesting. I’m not sure about southern California, but other parts of the southwest have hydrophobic soils that exacerbate flash flooding. This addition of vulcanized plant matter with the same characteristics would just make it worse.