Video: cliffside apartment buildings near San Francisco are about to fall

Those attempts to thwart the sea look very funny from afar, but I’m sure if I lived there I wouldn’t be laughing as much.

However, perhaps this would help me laugh (the quote I usually think of for Sealab 2021):

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Ahhh-yup. The lighthouse sitting on sand below on LI sound is doomed, and the sound is a pond compared to the ill named Pacific. They try and stabilize these bluffs with vegetation and rocks but the end is inevitable.

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Just FYI the California Coastal Commssion is very much a thing. You may not have heard of it, from your easy chair.

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All those big gray rocks at the bottom, which the waves are hitting? That’s management.

I used to live in Sea Bright NJ, which is the barrier island sandbar just south of Sandy Hook beach.
I knew I was renting my house (since I had a landlord :- ) ; some of my neighbors thought they actually owned theirs, instead of renting it from Mother Nature, who was eventually going to repossess the couple of feet of sand they lived on, even though the Army Corps of Engineers did occasionally pour a few more million dollars worth of cement into their seawall.

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Reminds me of a page in Oliver Jeffers’ Once Upon an Alphabet. “H” for the half-a-house.

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That’s a pretty good metaphor for everything humans do.

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This footage immediately put me in mind of the Inception collapsing “Limbo City.” Perhaps not surprising, given that supporting/surrounding footage was shot on the California coast, even if the collapsing buildings were CGI.

I grew up in similar circumstances - in St. Joseph, MI on the shore of Lake Michigan in the 1960s. There were numerous properties on a sand and clay bluff (about the same height) that eroded. The properties were also near a railroad and highway.

At first, a number of ad-hoc private “sea wall” solutions were attempted - mostly involving dumping construction debris and old automobiles (still leaking oil - this was pre EPA) over the side of the bluff in an uncoordinated attempt to preserve individual properties.

Eventually, the railroad and highway department coordinated in building adjoining seawalls - basically, laying in a plastic liner and placing enormous boulders in place to prevent waves from reaching the bluff. (The rocks eventually sunk into the sandy shore over the decades.)

And eventually, it was proven that the erosion had a cause - changes by the US Army Corp of Engineers to prevent sand from driving into the mouth of a river up the coast prevented the normal flow of sand replenishing the beach for miles downstream from a shoreline current. Without the beach, the shoreline approached the bluff, eventually eroding it. The US Army Corp resisted disclosing information about this long enough for the equivalent of a statute-of-limitations to apply. Tens of millions of dollars of property damage over the decades and more wasted in efforts to mitigate a manmade disaster.

The manmade disaster wasn’t just the US Army Corp of Engineers applying a local solution that caused a larger problem - there was plenty of mismanagement in property management, government zoning, etc.

“Global warming” and “ocean rise” might be partially to do with this - but there may also be a “natural current” along the shoreline that’s been disrupted by human constructions further up the coast (up s the current flows.) I’m no climate change denier - but the causes for this are likely to be more mundane and more local.

And frankly, building on top of a soil bluff at the edge of a large body of water is STUPID and SHORT SIGHTED.

That community is doomed - the road next to those apartments is doomed, and so are the properties on the other side of the road over the next few decades.

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Just the poor people, so you know no one that matters - 1% quote (maybe)

Right. And overall, our reaction to the current refugee crisis doesn’t look very pretty. Hard to imagine how bad it will get as the crisis scales up.

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Really? And here I’m thinking, “I bet I could afford to live there, now!”

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Well yesterday he claimed he could shoot someone dead in the middle of the street and not lose one vote from his supporters. So there’s that.

but they don’t offer flood insurance.

you can’t screw with nature, because if you screw with nature
that’s part of nature too.

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which is definitely wrong if he shoots one of his supporters.

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not if said supporter manages to vote posthumously.

To be sure, it will be over a longer time period, but displacement from natural disasters could also prove a lot less reversible than displacement due to civil war. And even if the time period is an order of magnitude longer, the scale of the displacement will be two to three orders of magnitude larger and will occur simultaneously worldwide.

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Sure, but a lighthouse isn’t very useful inland.

my nephew (3 years) would disagree: he calls every red/white tower lighthouse, be it radio masts, chimneys or even one of the few real lighthouses he saw in his life.