OT, houses falling down.

Other places have managed to prevent that from happening, e.g. by the use of groynes.

My Dad spent about half his career in the steel business, so when the bluff behind our place was eroding like that, he had about 30 scrap cars ('50s models) piled up two deep at the bottom of the bank on the sand. The sea filled them with sand, so they survived the winter storms, and held the bank up long enough for trees to grow on the eroding surface and stabilize it. (Our bank was about 100 feet high.)

Worked great.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Getting kicked in the groyne is not pleasant.

Kicking a groyne too hard can hurt quite a bit too. They tend not to move much when you do that.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Maybe one reason it hasn't become poplar.

Well, don't pine over it.

Wow, you can buy property insurance for those places?

Groynes won't work there.

Shaking does contribute a little to the problem but only a small fraction. This is a manmade problem that was set in motion nearly 60 years ago by mor on real estate developers looking to make a killing on "ocean view" propert ies. The soil there is called weakly lithified sediment, a fancy word for s and. The coastline has been steadily retreating for ten thousand years and will not be stopped. And the retreat is not all due to the ocean. Onshore u nderwater water runoff through naturally formed crevices also undermines th e steep slopes causing collapse.

I should have added (groyne) at the end. So much for humor.

All we wanted were oysters and beer, but we seem to have stumbled into some controversy. That ridge has been retreating for millenia, so it was a dumb place to build.

The house in my pic is on Esplanade Drive. Camelot should be OK for a few more decades.

Google for pics of pacifica erosion

The house in my pic has flood insurance, which will pay off if the house falls into the ocean.

Dunno, the insurance company may classify it as "earth movement" and refuse to pay on the flood insurance. ;-)/2

No, really, if it falls into the water it's covered by the flood insurance. They could sneak in one night and tip it over maybe.

Federal flood insurance?

That's what made a lot of the Katrina damage possible. When I lived there banks weren't lending on flood-prone areas, so the feds stepped in to make neighborhoods possible where--using one's own money and commonsense--none would have been built.

Everyone knew, but no one cared. "It's insured!" Which, actually, was a rational, mathematical calculation.

Something similar happened on Florida's Atlantic coast--taxpayers paying to rebuild trendy folks' splashy getaways. Socialism's great. It's always wonderful, helping the 'poor' like that.

Cheers, James Arthur

Most of New Orleans went underwater. It wasn't flood insurance that wiped NOLA out; it was a different sort of Federal bungling, namely the absurd levees on the man-made Industrial and 17th Street canals.

I used to run on the 17th Street canal that failed. It failed where they "reinforced it" by driving in corregated steel.

But there were several large developments in New Orleans East, new neighborhoods built as I described once the feds made taxpayer-funded flood insurance available.

They routinely flooded while I was still there. Everyone got new carpets and totaled their cars every few years... laissez les bon temps roulez!

Cheers, James Arthur

But, um...bailouts for the rich aren't "socialism", it's free-market capitalism as usual.

That's what pundits say of course, but what's free market about the gov't deciding whom to bail?

That's just the politics of socialism. That the richest counties in America now surround Washington D.C.--and that they've boomed far beyond the rest of the country in the last 7 years--ain't a coincidence.

Cheers, James Arthur

Damn, you're a trip. Who do you think lives in all those counties that brings the median income up so high? Is it all those government employees sucking at the taxpayer's teat?

No, it's a bunch of lawyers, PR firm staffers, and lobbyists making money hand over fist, getting paid off handsomely by their corporate masters for doing their bidding.