This winter's storms confronted us, once again, with the complicated issues surrounding construction in landslide-prone areas.
Landslides are a dramatic manifestation of the collision between humans and other natural forces.
Human impacts in the natural world generally appear subtly, over time, through a slow deterioration of water or air quality or a loss of vegetation. These types of impacts are often not apparent until they reach a critical level. Landslides, by contrast, are hard to miss. For many along Perkins Lane in Seattle the appeal of views outweighed to risks of landslides - until this year. With each landslide episode the impacts worsen because of the increased density of development and the escalating costs of infrastructure replacement.