North Carolina government revives landslide mapping program after 3 deaths

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Accuweather

State lawmakers in North Carolina approved the budget Friday and included $3.6 million for the Department of Environmental Quality to reboot a landslide mapping program that legislators stopped funding in 2011, according to the Associated Press.

The revival of the program comes just after three people died during May due to landslides in the western part of the state. On May 18, a woman in Polk County, North Carolina, died after her garage collapsed during a landslide. In another incident on May 30, two people died in a structural collapse due to a gas leak following a landslide in Boone, North Carolina.

Since these incidents, residents have expressed outrage over the lack of warning about landslide hazard areas.

The state directed the North Carolina Geological Survey to create landslide hazard maps in 19 of the mountain counties, but only four were mapped before the state ceased funding for the project in 2011, according to the Charlotte Observer.

Read more: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/north-carolina-government-revives-landslide-mapping-program-after-3-deaths/70005158

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According to the AP article linked above, the governor could still veto this.

The point of the mapping being that homeowners would be alerted to these areas and can obviously choose not to take the risk to build there. I know there are quite a few northern "snowbirds" who have moved there (Western NC/Smokies) as a retirement alternative to Florida (and that included an old boss of mine).

Additional background info -

NC cut landslide hazard program, despite dangers

By Andrew Carter And Bruce Henderson

May 31, 2018 05:26 PM
Updated June 03, 2018 05:26 PM

<...>

'Anti-regulatory sentiment'

More than the money, or the relative lack of it, what doomed Wooten’s team was what he described as “a lot of anti-regulatory sentiment” in state government – a sentiment that coincided with a period in which the mapping team began to build momentum. Between 2005 and 2010, Team Slide completed landslide hazard maps in Buncombe, Henderson, Macon and Watauga counties.

The purpose of the maps was to show which parts of those counties were most prone to landslides, the common term that describes what geologists most often call “debris flows.” If a landslide, or debris flow, has happened in one particular area of one particular slope, either on the side of a mountain or a hill, chances are high that it will happen again, and keep happening, over decades and centuries.

<...>

It wasn’t long, though, before the geologists’ hopes and goals met a formidable challenge: the desire to develop attractive mountainside land, and the desire for the value of that land to grow. One of Wooten’s former colleagues, a geologist named Jennifer Bauer, said the conflict between the intent of the maps and how some perceived them created “a lot of misunderstanding.”

“When people were looking at them, they weren’t asking us what they meant,” said Bauer, who worked with Wooten on the landslide mapping team. “We didn’t have the opportunity to communicate all of what the maps mean, so people looked at them, made their own conclusions and then said, 'Well I’m against them, because they may impact property values, or they may impact development.'”

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/latest-news/article212253189.html

[Hortensis]

1. They stopped mapping in 2011 after 4 of 19 counties!

We looked for land up there as it's very beautiful and rainy and relatively cool. We absolutely consulted slide maps for the counties we were interested in once we learned that it's common for heavy rains to trigger one somewhere, especially with increasing extreme rain events. The maps available then showed plenty of potential slide areas, and you can bet that affected our interest in purchasing in those areas. Villainous that they stopped mapping.

Before I learned to look for that I visited one, very beautiful 6-acre mountainside and ridge site sloping steeply down on one side to a meadow and river, which had an odd little mini ravine with straight sides near the top of part of it. I was intrigued with its potential for a special garden, but it was puzzling -- until a light came on and I realized that some years before most of one end of the ridge had probably shifted forward into the valley 20 feet or so, creating what now very looked like a crack in the earth; soil washing down over time would have given it its level floor.

That was before the last few years when these torrential rains have become so common. Just hope the county never granted a permit to build there.

[melm00se]

2. Roy Cooper

vetoed the state budget yesterday.

Cooper's proposed budget, according to the legislature's nonpartisan research staff would create a $470 million deficit.

The Republican now vetoed budget (which will get overridden as the Republicans hold a veto proof majority) would be balanced.

[BumRushDaShow]

3. Thank you for the update!