WATCH: Pacifica Coastal Erosion Caught on Drone Video – YouTube
Years and years ago, I used to live in the Bay Area in various houses and then even in a junkyard commune where we all worked on trucks and buses which was a lot of hippie fun back then. Wouldn’t do that today, of course. My family has lived in California and Arizona since the famous Gold Rush and we still have family there and my grandfather (and then the rest of us) would go about Los Angeles making fun of all the homes being built on unstable, dangerous mountainsides and the beach.
Oceans have a notorious function: they create these things called ‘waves’ not to mention ‘tsunamis’ and thus, the coastlines are unstable and depend on the whims of sea and wind as to the shape of these coastlines. None on earth are ‘stable’ 100% of the time. Silly humans insisting on building on beaches or edges of cliffs facing the ocean must resign themselves to being periodically wiped out. This fate seems to stop no one.
Compound on ‘Billionaire’s Row’ in Beverly Hills goes up for sale for $35M. Note it is being built not just on a cliff, the steep sides of this hill are flattened by the computer image. It is very steep. Note the hills behind: the plants are thin and rather new and this is because there have been landslides there which is why people built the other houses seen in this photo, right next to the spots where the landslides go.
The people who built cities and towns in Japan facing the Pacific Ocean did so knowing very well that tsunamis hit this shoreline regularly. They took this chance because nearly all of Japan is a geological disaster area as are a number of other geologically unstable areas. California is very much like Japan in this regard and this stopped no one from building there and this emphatically includes my own clan which has lived there for more then four generations.
My mother and father had to fly me out to California after one mid-sized earthquake to make many structural and cosmetic repairs on their very expensive home there which they then sold for a lot of money (afterwards, as they did several times in my life for no reason, they disinherited me, of course). The story of my life: free labor.
The geology and weather history of the entire US west coast is very well known by geologists and climatologists (before the climate guys went insane) and it is a desert/very wet cycle system that has volcanoes and earthquakes in great numbers not to mention some of the biggest epic floods in the history of geology. Humans ignore all this history and build inappropriate, flimsy, stupid structures that out to be torn down.
Oh, I forgot forest fires out there. Unlike the Northeast US which has a much more consistent climate, more or less, the entire West has this el Nino/la Nina cycle system where one is very wet and the other is very dry with the rain/drought cycle sometimes lasting 100 years of no rain to lots and lots of rain all depending on the sun, variables in the northern jet stream cycles, etc.
The Northeast has to worry mainly about the Ice Age/Interglacial cycles. Nothing built here will last 10,000 years because massive mile thick ice though the global warmists earnestly believe we will all roast to death and thus, die. But the military hopes WWIII will do the trick. Time for an anxiety attack! We are doomed.
Actually, the builders and sellers of the death traps in California should be all put in prison. The builders of these massive condo buildings should definitely be charged with attempted homicide. Building on a loose Ice Age soil cliff facing the Pacific’s full fury of waves that travel all the way from Japan, this has been known to cause cliff collapse since my grandfather’s day!
He talked about how stupid it was to build on these cliffs way back 60 years ago. As a child, he would go around the region explaining the dangers. He is the one who said to me at age five, ‘NEVER turn your back on the ocean or it will kill you’, which was great advice and I and a fisherman in New York saved two children from the fury of the sea when a rogue wave suddenly appeared on the horizon (a rogue wave looks like a dark blue/black line on the horizon) and we ran and took these children and ran ashore with them. The wave went all the way up to Surf Avenue.
California’s government and universities have lots of geologists none of whom are listened to when it comes to laws, giving building permits or ANYTHING sane. Imagine forcing people to not build right on top of fault lines! There goes a big hunk of Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as Oakland and Berkeley. When I was at Berkeley, my rental was a post-earthquake 1915 house which was right on the fault.
I was flipping eggs when the quake happened and I was pissed that when I flipped them, the stove shifted a few inches and the eggs went to the floor then I realized the entire house was shifting and I ran outside. Since then, it was torn down and replaced with multi-story student housing which will rip in half when the Big Quake happens, not a simple 4.5 event like the one I survived.
I wonder why we even bother to have geologists. Why bother with educating people if the rulers want to do stupid things, anyways. This is certainly true in Japan, too. Japanese have known about earthquakes and tsunamis since Medieval times yet they built this multi-nuclear power complex right smack dab where both earthquakes and tsunamis are geologically VERY common with the obvious result of Fukashima which is menacing the entire planet.
It is still madly destroying the environment and polluting the oceans which is why our rulers latched onto ‘global warming’ and then made it ‘climate change’ screaming about how we are going to die if it is slightly warmer than the Little Ice Age and I am now assuming their stupid plans are to make a mile thick ice sheet to cover all of Canada for of course, who doesn’t hate Canada? Everyone wants Canada annihilated, at least, at the top of the totem pole.
Totem poles were invented by Northwest natives living in mainly, Canada, so our rulers hate them all, I suppose. HAHAHA. Good lord, the insanity of all this! In California which had a TYPICAL and totally normal and actually, very short drought (some last 100+years or more in the past especially during the Little Ice Age) is more worried about it being slightly warmer and blames the lack of rain on the warm weather even though all the major droughts there coincide with global cooling.
But then, when has anyone in California been totally sane? Impossible. One has to be crazy to live there which is why my family moved there generations ago and we were certainly not the sanest people on earth, far from it!
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Culture of Life News 
The story of my life: free labor.
Sad.
Do not be an unpaid intern. They can be replaced with another unpaid intern.
Nice rant. You can definitely see geology happening in that video.
I suspect the cliffs that your grandfather was talking about, are not there any more.
There’s some opposing forces working there — all that land, those mountains, just rose up in recent (geologically recent) times. Followed by erosion, which filled up the low areas with silt. Then more uplift, as the great continental plates slowly grind into each other. Some more erosion, and you have these high vertical cliffs.
I had some second cousins living in Pacifica in the 20th century. I wonder if their old house is still there? (the current members of that family now live on the east coast, I believe — though I haven’t kept in touch..) They lived in a little old house like your 1915 one.
I know people living in Bretagne (Brittany) France. They told me in the old days their ancestors on the coast would face their buildings AWAY from the ocean, since they knew the destructive power of storms.
bribes, and yeah i’ve been watching the news saying the same,,
@#! Lee: You know what they say, sh#t rolls down hill and at the bottom of this hill are…the interns. Unpaid interns DO get replaced with unpaid interns. The ONLY way it pays to do the unpaid intern thing is if it gets you networking opportunities and some actual job experience. As an unpaid intern you focus on that and if you are not getting those opportunities, QUIT even if it has only been 2 or three weeks. As an unpaid intern your primary focus needs to be, “What’s in it for me?” If all they want from you as an unpaid intern is a go-fer, tell them “Adios!!” after a couple of weeks.
Ain’t Laissez Faire capitalism (ie neoliberalism) just grand?
Michael Moore has some facts on the Flint water scandal, which is just more looting of the insignificant peasants (ie the non-elites).
http://michaelmoore.com/10FactsOnFlint/
I sometimes think about the destruction of Canada, all of our buildings, infrastructure and institutions annihilated by a crushing sheet of ice in a few thousands years or less – it’s possible that nothing we create will last as long as the Parthenon, for example. The forces of nature are, indeed, sublime.
The Parthenon was totally intact until the 1600s when the Turks put their explosives there and it blew up. It was pure human vandalism at work.
Christian W– have you ever visited –let alone lived–in a majority Black city?
Detroit [and Flint, Pontiac, etc] are Black run.
That is all you need to know.
Call me a racist. Others have.
Mike Moore lives in a 99%? White city. Like Will Smith.