CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
STATION #1 Los Angeles Should Be Buried
A day in the war between the city and its mountains.
BY JUSTIN NOBELILLUSTRATION BY MARK TODDMARCH 12, 2015
T
he San Gabriel Mountains are waging war on Los Angeles and Ed Heinlein’s chainsaw is screaming in the
late afternoon sun. It’s January 2015 and Heinlein, who has a friendly paunch and paws sheathed in mudstained work gloves, is carving up avocado trees. They were drowned the previous year when a series of mud
freight trains roared out of the hills above his house. “Welcome to mud central,” says Heinlein, “The assistant fire
chief tells me it’s the most dangerous property in L.A.”
Heinlein is a retired elementary school teacher, current Christian minister, and has a preacher’s tendency to
speak in terms of fire and brimstone. He lives in Azusa, a scenic nook in the foothills of the San Gabriel
Mountains, which rise 10,000 feet above the city of Los Angeles. Aware that the mountain range’s mud war is far
from over, Heinlein has spent more than $100,000 to protect his property behind a trio of steel and concrete
walls. Immediately surrounding his home is a final barrier, consisting of about 400 sandbags, 60 sheets of
plywood and heavy plastic sheeting. It is a mighty fortification, so complete that Heinlein and his family cannot
even exit their backdoor.
The mountains have been hammering Los Angeles for as long as Heinlein, 66, can remember. In 1969,
tremendous rains caused a 20-foot wave of muddy debris to race down the mountains, burying homes and
streets, and together with related flooding and landslides, killing more than 100 people in the foothills. Still, the
developers keep building. As the evening sky goes purple then black and stars come out, Heinlein silences his
chainsaw and points across the valley to a tract of twinkling multi-million-dollar homes. “When the big one
comes, there’s nothing my walls can do, nothing anyone can do,” he says. “People in that new development are
going to be trapped, and they’ll be flying them out in helicopters.”
Los Angeles was not built upon Hollywood or citrus groves or oil. It was built upon mud and sand and gravel.
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
A quarter of a century ago, master scribe John McPhee wrote about the San Gabriel Mountains’ profoundly
destructive rivers of mud, called debris flows, in a pair of New Yorker articles titled “Los Angeles Against the
Mountains.” These large watery pulses of mud and rock are triggered
by rain and often fire and charge down steep stream and gully
channels. Upon encountering flatter terrain, such as the graded lot of
Heinlein’s house, they fan out to form thick muddy deposits. One of
the most devastating debris flows occurred on New Year’s Day, 1934.
Following a season of fires, rivers of debris poured down the
mountains into the city, killing dozens of people. “Model A’s were so
deeply buried that their square roofs stuck out of the mud like rafts,”
McPhee wrote.
The Oz-like geologic magician running the show is the San Andreas
Fault. It cuts across California from the Mexican border to Cape Mendocino and separates the North American
plate, which is moving southeast, from the Pacific plate, which is moving northwest. The San Gabriel Mountains
lie along a 150 mile-long kink, where the fault jogs west, and where the Pacific Plate is pushing smack into the
North American Plate—hence the mountain range. Geologists estimate the San Gabriels are rising at a rate of 1
millimeter a year. Although fingernails grow 36 times as quick, for a mountain range that is pretty fast.
The San Gabriels are also crumbling fast. Regular earthquake motion along the San Andreas and adjacent
faults has riddled the San Gabriels with cracks, weakening the rock. Areas of bedrock beneath the mountains
are 1 billion years old, and worn down, adding to the rock’s tendency to crumble. And while glaciers during the
last ice age smoothed and sculpted northern California’s mountains, evident in Yosemite’s dramatic rock
formations, the San Gabriels were never glaciated and are still carpeted with loose rock. During
rainstorms that follow fires, this soil is released in the form of debris flows. Los Angeles, it turns out, was
built not upon Hollywood or citrus groves or oil. It was built upon mud and sand and gravel, roughly 1 to 2 million
years of debris flows layered upon one another to form a gigantic apron of sediment that rings the mountains and
underlies the city. The problem is the mountains are still falling, and the city is still in the way.
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
The great debris flow of 1934 taught city planners a valuable lesson. In Haines Canyon, wrote McPhee, a
gravel pit fortuitously swallowed one flow’s mud, saving the village of Tujunga, which lay downstream.
Eureka! “With enough money—enough steam shovels, enough dump trucks, enough basins cupped
beneath the falling hills,” said McPhee. “Los Angeles could defy the mountains.”
M
an, this is a clear day,” whistles Steve Sheridan. “You don’t get many of
these.”
It’s a crisp blue Monday and we are in the foothills above Azusa, watching the sun
rise over the city. Sheridan, a short stocky Boston native, with the accent to prove
it, is an engineer with Flood Maintenance. This relatively unknown division within
the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works has a tremendous task: to
hold back the mountains. After fires have loosened the soil and rain has
brought it down the hillsides, Flood Maintenance and its debris basins are the last bastion of defense.
Sheridan gestures to the vast metropolis below, a seemingly endless sprawl of homes and buildings, what he
likes to call the flatlands. “None of this development down there would be possible without structures like
these in the hills,” he says, indicating a modest-sized concrete dam, Beatty Debris Basin, built by the city in
1970. “And a lot of the residents down there have no idea these things even exist.”
Beatty Debris Basin is shaped like a heart and lies at the foot of steep brown hills. For much of the year there is
nothing behind the dam, but when debris flows empty out of the hills the basin can fill to the brim with mud in just
30 minutes, as happened at a nearby debris basin during the same late February storm that swamped Heinlein’s
home. A video of that event shot by a local couple shows a churning brown sea. “Oh-My-Gosh!” cries the wife.
“This is just not good! Oh-My-Gosh!” But Sheridan, who chuckles when he tells the story, says she shouldn’t
have been so surprised, the debris basin was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
That is, mud flows out of the hills via streams and gullies then is stopped by concrete or earthen dams.
Material pools up in the basin, and a spillway whose entrance is partially barricaded by wood planks
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
allows water to drain, ideally keeping out rocks and trees—20 foot-long trunks are not uncommon. Water
also drains through thin slots in a concrete vertical tower, located in the middle of the basin. A similar
structure, called an incline tower, lies flat against the bottom edge of the basin. These structures are critical, as
the quicker a basin can be drained, the quicker the soil and debris can be organized by Sheridan’s men and
hauled away. And in winter, when storms can stack up against the coast, there is very real pressure to get the
mud out quickly.
The job may be urgent, but the tools are simple, even antiquated. After big events, Sheridan’s men “clear the
weedies,” which involves rowing an aluminum boat to the vertical tower and using potato picks to untangle the
threads of vegetation that clog the tower’s slots. An excavator builds a “finger levee,” a raised road of mud that
allows the machine to drive beside the tower and begin scooping material, allowing more water to drain. Water
drained through the vertical and incline towers joins water drained through the spillway and enters a system of
concrete channels— Los Angeles County has 3,300 miles of these channels—that cut across the county to the
sea.
H2O is precious in L.A., and in 30 spots across the county water is diverted out of the concrete
channels—the role of a division within Public Works called Water Resources—and into a network of flat
barren fields that resemble rice paddies. These “spreading grounds” allow water to percolate down
through layers of rock and sediment underlying the city and replenish the highly utilized water table.
Looking to either side of Beatty Debris Basin one can see why these water conservation structures are so
essential: people. A housing development flanks one side of the basin and on the other side a new one is going
up, freshly laid Spanish roofing tiles glinting in the sun.
It wasn’t too far from Beatty where the fire that set the stage for the debris flows that hit Heinlein’s home began.
On Jan. 16, 2014 three men camped illegally in the foothills, woke up cold and built a campfire. The blaze swiftly
jumped its rock ring and sprinted west along the hilltops, torching trees and brush along the Colby Truck Trail.
(The incident is now known as the Colby Fire.) “It looked like hellfire in the sky,” says Heinlein, who was watching
from his deck. “Hot embers started raining down, and with God as my witness a Manzanita tree exploded like a
drum of fuel and there was a 30-foot ring of fire. Another eight or 10 manzanitas exploded and the whole
mountain was alive with fire.”
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
FIRE AND RAIN: The 2014 debris flow started with a fire in the San Gabriel foothills, ignited by illegal campers. Following the blaze,
seen here in the town of Azusa, thunderstorms kicked loose gravel, sand, and boulders the size of cars, and sent them streaming toward the
city.ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
More than 100 firefighters from four counties battled the blaze. Six weeks later
came the rain. Mud and rock began flowing down gullies in the scorched hills
above Heinlein’s home, damming up behind a steel fence and swamping his
avocado trees. Then in March that year a thunderstorm in the foothills unleashed more mud from the mountains,
bursting through Heinlein’s protective fence, burying a basketball court halfway up to the hoop and enveloping
his house in a sea of mud 4 feet high.
Errant tongues of mud like the one that lashed Heinlein’s home are an aberration. Approximately 200,000 cubic
yards of San Gabriel mud are trapped behind L.A. County debris basins each year. In years following fires, 2
million cubic yards of mud are trapped, or about 200,000 dump trucks-worth. Beatty is one of 163 debris basins
in the county, and was one of five debris basins in the area affected by the Colby Fire. The February/March rains
that hit Heinlein’s home unleashed 60,000 cubic yards of mud into those five basins. Flood Maintenance hauled
it out. A round of storms late last fall filled the basins with another 65,000-70,000 cubic yards of material. Flood
Maintenance hauled it out. Just before Christmas, more rain came and the hills continued to spew mud, filling the
Beatty basin with about 5,000 cubic yards of sediment.
It’s 9 a.m. and Flood Maintenance is hauling mud. The sediment pile is divided into three loading stations, where
a revolving battalion of 34 dump trucks backs up to be loaded down by dozers and excavators, like a herd of
robotic yellow elephants. A flagger choreographs the trucks into and out of the loading stations. I feel like I’ve
entered a real-life Bob the Builder set.
“That’s a 400-pound rock,” says Ron Driggs, a second generation Flood Maintenance guy who got his first Public
Works job at age 19. An excavator delivers a rock-studded mouthful of dirt into the bed of a blue dump truck, it
drops with a tremendous clang. An uneven drop can rock a dump truck like a boat and give a driver whiplash.
Dozers work the sides of the pile, tidying up material for the next round of dumps.
“Once it gets going it’s a well-oiled machine,” Driggs proudly states. The operation indeed has a harmony, an
elbow-grease symphony of purring engines and droning hydraulics. As I watch it unfold, I can’t help but reflect
that most L.A. County residents are kept safe behind barriers they don’t even know exist.
CGU4U/C
T
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
he Flood Maintenance guys like to say the city’s battle plan hasn’t changed much since 1934. Let
the basins fill. Haul the debris out. But geologists continue to learn more about debris flows, whose underlying
mechanisms remain shrouded in mystery.
At California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, geologist Michael Lamb is touring me around his
airplane hangar-sized Earth Surface Dynamics Laboratory. “What we are doing is speeding up geologic time,”
says Lamb excitedly. He is dressed in a crisp button-down and slacks, with finely combed hair. An ordered
appearance, perhaps to counter the chaos of the phenomenon he is studying.
The lab is dominated by a pair of what appear to be free-standing mall escalators. These are flumes, mechanical
stream beds that allow Lamb to alter slope, water speed, sediment size, and sediment quantity to assess just
what makes rainy, recently burned hillsides shoot out rivers of mud. The flumes are rigged with fancy sensing
equipment, including cameras, pressure gauges and even an ultrasound, to capture the internal structure of the
lab-induced debris flows.
CALL THEM SISYPHUS: The battle to hold back the mountains from burying Los
Angeles is an endless job for city workers. At debris basins, or spreading grounds, seen
above, vertical towers help drain the water from the mud, gravel and sand, allowing it to to be
hauled away to sediment placement sites around the city.Courtesy Steve Sheridan & Jim and
Patti Griffin
“There are ideas about how this all works,” says
Lamb, “but the truth is, it is still a pretty big mystery.
Where is the sediment coming from, and why is there
suddenly a large change in the supply of sediment
after a fire? We don’t know the full answer yet.”
Lamb’s research has highlighted two significant
reasons that fires trigger debris flows. The San
Gabriels are steep, with many slopes greater than 45
degrees, that sediment, which is not stable beyond
slopes of 30 to 40 degrees, is continuously sliding
down hillsides. Growing on these steep crumbly
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
slopes is a community of plants, shrubs, and trees known as chaparral. Lamb has found that chaparral trees and
bushes act as tiny dams, trapping sediment between their trunks and stems. But when the San Gabriel’s
chaparral burns, which happens about once every 30 years, these tiny sediment traps are released. Soil is
carried downhill by gravity and collects in flatter places, such as streambeds. With rain, that sediment begins
moving. Flows pick up more sediment as they go, and rocks and boulders, too, then rush downhill as potentially
deadly debris flows.
To truly crack the mountains’ endless assault on L.A., Lamb needs to understand exactly how much rain is
necessary to get the soil accumulated in streambeds moving. A third flume in the rear of his lab helps him gain
insight into how the Mississippi River Delta works. Deep rivers with low slopes are capable of carrying vast
quantities of sediment within their water column—the Mississippi, for example, is not a debris flow, it is just a
very muddy river. Yet on steep slopes, gravity doesn’t allow for deep rivers, meaning the swift shallow streams
that develop don’t have the ability to move a lot of mud. When overwhelmed with fine sediment, a somewhat
mysterious transition occurs and streams like those in the San Gabriels are transformed from currents of water to
bucking, violent flows of mud, sand, gravel, “and boulders the size of cars,” says Lamb.
To illustrate this point, Lamb shows me a video of a rainy hillside in the Italian Alps. A swift-flowing valley stream
is joined by a small debris flow shooting down a side canyon and instantaneously becomes a raging torrent of
mud. “You see that!” Lamb exclaims as the flows merge. “We have no idea what is happening there.”
The tectonic-plate model is a reminder of the geologic forces
churning beneath our feet. Life is not static. Nature will have
its way.
But it has something to do with the influx of fine sediment transforming the channel into a concentrated debris
flow. If Lamb could better understand this transition point, then at some point Flood Maintenance guys like
Sheridan might know exactly when a recently burned hillside is going to release a river of mud. But to get there
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
Lamb needs cameras on the hillsides. In Switzerland and Japan, pressure transducers and motion
detectors in the beds of rivers allows researchers to determine whether a flow coming down a mountain
is water or mud before it reaches an inhabited area. But the United States, laments Lamb, is lacking in
publicly funded environmental monitoring. While the U.S. Geological Survey is ramping up a program to
monitor debris flows in post-fire landscapes, and has placed sensing equipment in a few spots in the San
Gabriels, Lamb says these monitoring stations are not permanent and not enough. “To get better predictions,” he
says, “we need better data.”
Before I leave Caltech, I drop in on professor of geology and geophysics Joann Stock. We talk about the ultimate
source of debris flows in the San Gabriel Mountains, the San Andreas Fault. On a model meant for middleschool students, she shows me how land west of the fault, including L.A., is being dragged northwest up the
length of California by the Pacific Plate. Santa Barbara used to be down near San Diego, Monterrey used to be
in the Mojave Desert. As the plate pulls this valuable sliver of land northwestward, mountain ranges are sprung
up then chewed back down, inland seas born then silted over, the earth’s surface continuously crumpled or
flattened, as if it were merely a living room carpet being pulled about by the family dog.
In 70 million years, this sliver will have been towed across the North Pacific Ocean and will smash into Alaska.
When this happens, the massive mountain range formed by the collision will make the San Gabriels look like a
string of sand castles. Nobody knows what the Pacific Coast, or for that matter, the entire Earth will look like in
70 million years. “We can’t predict the future,” says Stock with a smile.
Nevertheless, Stock’s model is a reminder of the geologic forces churning beneath our feet. Life is not static.
Nature will have its way. Our sense of control is a story we tell ourselves in order to live, to paraphrase Joan
Didion’s opening line of The White Album, her 1979 collection of essays about California.
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
STATION #3: Japan to build huge, costly sea wall to fend off tsunamis
By Elaine Kurtenbach The Associated Press
This picture taken by a Miyako City
official on March 11, 2011 and
released on March 18, 2011 shows
a tsunami breeching an
embankment and flowing into the
city of Miyako in Iwate prefecture
shortly after a 9.0 magnitude
earthquake hit the region of
northern Japan.
JIJI PRESS/AFP/Getty Images
SENDAI, Japan – Four years after a
towering tsunami ravaged much of
Japan’s northeastern coast, efforts to
fend off future disasters are focusing on a nearly 400-kilometre chain of cement sea walls, at places nearly
five stories high.
Opponents of the 820 billion yen ($8.59 billion Cdn) plan argue that the massive concrete barriers will
damage marine ecology and scenery, hinder vital fisheries and actually do little to protect residents who are
mostly supposed to relocate to higher ground. Those in favour say the sea walls are a necessary evil, and
one that will provide some jobs, at least for a time.
In the northern fishing port of Osabe, Kazutoshi Musashi chafes at the 12.5-meter-high concrete barrier
blocking his view of the sea.
“The reality is that it looks like the wall of a jail,” said Musashi, 46, who lived on
the seaside before the tsunami struck Osabe and has moved inland since.
Pouring concrete for public works is a staple strategy for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its backers
in big business and construction, and local officials tend to go along with such plans.
The paradox of such projects, experts say, is that while they may reduce some damage, they can foster
complacency. That can be a grave risk along coastlines vulnerable to tsunamis, storm surges and other
natural disasters. At least some of the 18,500 people who died or went missing in the 2011 disasters failed
to heed warnings to escape in time.
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
Tsuneaki Iguchi was mayor of Iwanuma, a town just south of the region’s biggest city, Sendai, when the
tsunami triggered by a magnitude-9 earthquake just off the coast inundated half of its area.
A 7.2-meter-high sea wall built years earlier to help stave off erosion of Iwanuma’s beaches slowed the wall
of water, as did stands of tall, thin pine trees planted along the coast. But the tsunami still swept up to 5
kilometres inland. Passengers and staff watched from the upper floors and roof of the airport as the waves
carried off cars, buildings and aircraft, smashing most homes in densely populated suburbs not far from the
beach.
The city repaired the broken sea walls but doesn’t plan to make them any taller. Instead, Iguchi was one of
the first local officials to back a plan championed by former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa to plant
mixed forests along the coasts on tall mounds of soil or rubble, to help create a living “green wall” that would
persist long after the concrete of the bigger, man-made structures has crumbled.
“We don’t need the sea wall to be higher. What we do need is for everyone to
evacuate,” Iguchi said.
“The safest thing is for people to live on higher ground and for people’s homes
and their workplaces to be in separate locations. If we do that, we don’t need to
have a ‘Great Wall,”‘ he said.
While the lack of basic infrastructure can be catastrophic in developing countries, too heavy a reliance on
such safeguards can lead communities to be too complacent at times, says Margareta Wahlstrom, head of
the U.N.’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
“There’s a bit of an overbelief in technology as a solution, even though everything we have learned
demonstrates that people’s own insights and instincts are really what makes a difference, and technology in
fact makes us a bit more vulnerable,” Wahlstrom said in an interview ahead of a recent conference in
Sendai convened to draft a new framework for reducing disaster risks.
READ MORE: Indian Ocean tsunami: Remembering the day the wave came
In the steelmaking town of Kamaishi, more than 1,000 people died in the 2011 tsunami, but most school
students fled to safety zones immediately after the earthquake, thanks to training by a civil engineering
professor, Toshitaka Katada.
The risk is not confined to Japan, said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate
Center, who sees this in the attitudes of fellow Dutch people who trust in their low-lying country’s defences
against the sea.
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
“The public impression of safety is so high, they would have no idea what to do
in case of a catastrophe,” he said.
Despite pockets of opposition, getting people to agree to forego the sea walls and opt instead for
Hosokawa’s “Great Forest Wall” plan is a tough sell, says Tomoaki Takahashi, whose job is to win support
for the forest project in local communities.
“Actually, many people are in favour of the sea walls, because they will create
jobs,” said Takahashi. “But even people who really don’t like the idea also feel
as if they would be shunned if they don’t go along with those who support the
plan,” he said.
While the “Great Forest Wall” being planted in some areas would not stave off flooding, it would slow
tsunamis and weaken the force of their waves. As waters recede, the vegetation would help prevent
buildings and other debris from flowing back out to sea. Such projects would also allow rain water to flow
back into the sea, a vital element of marine ecology.
Some voices in unexpected places are urging a rethink of the plan.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife, Akie, offered numerous objections to cementing the northeast coast in a
speech in New York last September. She said the walls may prevent residents from keeping an eye out for
future tsunamis and would be costly to maintain for already dwindling coastal communities.
“Please do not proceed even if it’s already decided,” she said. Instead of a onesize-fits-all policy, she suggested making the plan more flexible. “I ask, is
building high sea walls to shield the coast line really, really the best?”
Rikuzentakata, a small city near Osabe whose downtown area was wiped out by the tsunami, is building a
higher sea wall, but also moving many tons of earth to raise the land well above sea level.
Local leader Takeshi Konno said no construction project will eliminate the need for coastal residents to
protect themselves.
“What I want to stress is that no matter what people try to create, it won’t beat nature, so we humans need
to find a way to co-exist with nature,” Konno said. “Escaping when there is danger . the most important thing
is to save your life.”
Associated Press writers Miki Toda and Koji Ueda contributed to this report from Rikuzentakata and Osabe.
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
STATION #4: Terraced Hillsides
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
STATION # 5: The cycle of poverty and natural disasters
Natural catastrophes are as much a result of poverty and weak government as plate tectonics
and weather - that’s why they hit the world's poor hardest.
Stories of Great Floods are common to many cultures. Such catastrophes are almost always acts of angry
Gods. Looked at this way, recent events suggest the Gods are furious.
Disastrous floods, storms, earthquakes and droughts are twice as frequent as in the 1980s, according to the
Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). Most striking is the huge jump in weatherrelated disasters.
But what really explains this extraordinary acceleration?
The difference between hazards and disasters
Cyclones, earthquakes, and erupting volcanoes are hazards, but they only become deadly disasters when
they happen in vulnerable areas where people have few defences.
“It only becomes a disaster when you introduce poverty,” says Ian Bray, spokesman for UK charity Oxfam.
That is why the 2010 Haiti earthquake killed over 200,000 people while the much stronger Chilean tremor a
few weeks later claimed fewer than 500 lives. And why the hurricanes, storms and floods that also regularly
batter Haiti kill more than 10 times as many people there than in neighboring, richer Dominican Republic.
Weak infrastructure, crumbling buildings, rapid population growth, poor governance, precarious rural
livelihoods and ecosystem decline all underpin the rapid expansion of disaster risk in the developing world.
Climate change makes things worse, skewing disaster impacts even more towards poorer communities.
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
Matching disaster risks to country types
The UN Development Program (UNDP) pinpoints which kinds of countries are most exposed to particular
disaster types in its report 'Reducing Disaster Risk'. This concludes:
- Earthquakes hit hardest in countries with high urban growth rates, like China and Indonesia
- Tropical cyclones do most damage in countries with a high percentage of arable land, such as Myanmar
and the Philippines
- Floods cause most problems in countries with low Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, like
Bangladesh and India
The UNDP has also found that while just 11% of people exposed to natural hazards live in poor countries,
those nations suffer 53% of total deaths.
And the poor - through ignorance and desperation - sometimes contribute to their own downfall by
deforesting hillsides or over-cultivating farmland, leading to new cycles of flood, drought or landslides.
Meanwhile, rapid, uncontrolled urbanization in the developing world is creating new disaster risks.
“In the next 20 years the world’s population will grow by about 2 billion people and all the growth will occur
in cities in the developing world,” warns Brian Tucker, president of NGO Geohazards International. “That
results in more people in shoddily-built buildings.”
Better governance needed
Knowing these risk factors means authorities must better plan how to protect people and develop their
economies more safely - rather than blaming “acts of God” and relying on disaster relief.
The Dutch have shown it is possible, with proper planning and political will, to contain natural hazards, in
their case storm surges and flooding rivers.
The Bangladeshis too, in a more low-tech way, have set up early warning systems for floods and cyclones
based on volunteers with bicycles and megaphones, and text message alerts.
By contrast, it wasn’t the weather that turned drought into famine in Congo, Kenya and Sudan but rather
armed conflict and weak food distribution networks.
And in China corrupt builders and officials have been blamed for the high death toll in the 2008 Sichuan
earthquake.
“Good progress is also being made in other areas,” reports the UNDP. such as "upgrading squatter
settlements, strengthening rural livelihoods, protecting ecosystems, and using microfinance,
microinsurance".
The fact is that ancient flood myths owe more to their civilizations’ proximity to large rivers than to divine
intervention. Back then technology could not contain the floodwaters.
Today it can, but not all communities can pay for it. It is our responsibility to fix that and make sure natural
hazards no longer turn into natural disasters.
Article by: James Tulloch
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
Environmental Threats to Cities and the Human Response
STATION #1: DEBRIS FLOWS IN THE SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS OF LOS ANGELES
1. What is a debris flow? How does it occur?
2. What other natural disaster increases LA’s susceptibility of debris flows?
3. How does underlying geology increase susceptibility of debris flows?
4. Describe the infrastructure that LA public works has created to mitigate the
damage/danger from debris flows coming out of the mountains?
5. How does LA turn this unfortunate situation into a way to collect much needed water for
the city?
6. What technologies have been employed in other countries to monitor debris flows?
Where is LA in this technology?
7. OPINION: Should planners be avoiding the development of the area or just increase
infrastructure to avoid or limit damages from debris flows?
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
STATION # 2: WINDMILLS, DYKES & DUTCH INGENUITY
1. What is a polder and what purpose does it serve?
2. What is the difference between a modern and traditional polder?
3. How have modern cities in the Netherlands and Germany increased the threat of RIVER
flooding & what was the response of the Dutch government?
4. How is climate change impacting SEA and RIVER flooding threats?
5. Fighting off flooding is not a new concern for the Dutch. How did they historically pump
water away from the low lying lands to make them fit for agriculture?
6. Explain how economics are driving the “Water Table Tug of War” that is still lowering the
soil level and making it more susceptible to future flooding.
7. How has the “green revolution” in Dutch farming impacted sustainability both positively
and negatively?
8. What are 3 concerns related to the future of the polder system?
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
STATION #3: JAPAN’S TSUNAMI PREPERATION: A GREEN OR CONCRETE SCENE?
1. Compare the 2 opposing methods for engineering the 400km Tsunami Wall
#1
#2
_____________________
_____________________
Description:
Description:
Environmental impact:
Environmental impact:
Economic Impact:
Economic Impact:
Social Impact:
Social Impact:
2. How could informed land use planning along the coast act to avoid the devastation of a
future Tsunami, with or without a new sea wall?
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
STATION #4: TURNING MOUNTIANS INTO TERRACED FARMERS FIELDS
Mountains are not inherently a threat to cities but they do present a harsh environment in
which people must overcome in order to survive.
1. What is a terrace and how is it an efficient way to perform agriculture in mountainous
areas?
ASIAN TERRACES:
2. British anthropologist said that “ Most of the continents rice is eaten within walking
distance of where it is grown”. What impact does this practice have on sustainability?
3. How is farming terraces different from our conventional North American method of
farming?
4. What impact does this intensive farming have on social and cultural order within Asian
communities or “Subaks”? Why is it considered so efficient?
SOUTH AMERICAN TERRACES:
5. What are two ways that terraces protect the people or environment?
6. What effect does migration have on the people who historically have lived and worked
the hillside terraces?
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
STATION #5: THE CYCLE OF POVERTY AND NATURAL DISASTERS
1. What is the difference between a hazard and a disaster?
2. How do the effects of the earthquakes, hurricanes and flood damage show the gap
between hazard and disaster when comparing Haiti and the more developed nations of
Chile and the Dominican Republic?
3. What risk factors associated with poor countries magnify the effects of a hazard on
developing nations?
4. Which type of countries do the following hazard types affect most?
Earthquakes:
Tropical Cyclones:
Floods:
5. How do the poor unknowingly contribute to their own disaster risk?
6. How can/has governance policy affected people in situations prone to disaster
Good Policy Outcomes
Bad Policy Outcomes
STATION # 6: IMPACT OF LAND USE PLANNING ON PREDICTABLE HAZARDS: VOLCANOES
CGU4U/C
Unit: Sustainability in the Global Environment
Use the computer to analyze Volcanic Eruptions in the islands of Hawaii & Mont Serrat
HAWAII
MONT SERRAT
Turn on the population density layer and change the
On the Google Maps tab locate the city of “Plymouth” and
basemap to satellite image
the towns “Kinsale” and “St. Patricks”
Where are the major settlements located in relation to the
4 volcanoes on the island? (patterns and trends)
Describe Plymouth or the other small towns: (spatial
significance)
In what ways have Hawaiians prepared in advance for
future eruptions?( interrelationships)
Considering their proximity to an active volcano, do you
think this small island had planned around a potential
eruption? (geographic perspectives)
Can you find any parts of the built environment that may be
in less than ideal locations considered the volcanoes?
Do you think Hawaiians have planned around a potential
eruption? Why or why not? (geographic perspectives)
In what ways are the two islands similar or different when it comes to preparation or repercussions of living near active
volcanoes?