Seven houses down in the opposite direction another neighbor heard the noise and walked outside in her bathrobe to look around. She saw the shattered plywood walls on the beach, the mountain of mud, and the tree standing serenely. She heard no more sounds. So still that I thought this must have happened the night before, and I just hadn't noticed. When Dave Montgomery, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Washington, saw the front-page story in the newspaper the next day, he shook his head.
Normal slopes tend to round over time.
These stories were read not as cautionary tales but as entertaining anecdotes about life in the rainy Northwest. But we have some sense of those risks. Most people have no sense of the landslide risk. You don't live through a landslide at your house very often. Now, we have places that we can easily identify that were formed by periodic debris flows.