Doc Searls Weblog

Archive: 1999–2007

Monday, January 10, 2005

Mud slide coverage

Look up La Conchita, some of which is now (predictably, if you know history and geology) under mud, in Google News and Technorati. The first gathers mainstream media (AP and UPI, mostly); the second gathers blogs. Right now (9pm Pacific) I can't find anything in the mainstream that agrees with what I'm hearing on KNX Radio (the regional news radio station in Los Angeles) is saying: 12 missing and 3 dead. A number of blogs not only agree, but provide interesting local background. (Here's some video.)

Somewhere around here I have some pictures I took of that hillside, in expectation of what happened today.

I see Amtrak is cut off here and there, and downed transmission lines cut off power to radio and TV stations on Mt. Wilson.

Told you so

From Battle Lessons: What the generals don't know, in The New Yorker:

They wrote a book about commanding a company, "Taking the Guidon," which they posted on a Web site. Because of the Internet, what had started as a one-way transfer of information — a book — quickly became a conversation.

Why the mountains win

In this season of tsunamis and mud slides, a must-read is John McPhee's The Control of Nature. It gathers three long essays (I assume from The New Yorker), the last and best of which is "Los Angeles Against the Mountains." One excerpt:

The snout of the debris flow was twenty feet high, tapering behind. Debris flows sometimes ooze along, and sometimes move as fast as the fastest river rapids. The huge dark snout...was moving nearly five hundred feet a minute and rest of the flow behind was coming twice as fast, making roll waves as it piled forward against itself-this great slug, as geologists would describe it, this discrete slug, this heaving violence of wet cement. Already included in the debris were propane tanks, outbuildings, picnic tables, canyon live oaks, alders, ... mile downstream and buried in the reservoir behind Big Tujunga Dam. Thirteen people were part of the debris. Most of the bodies were never found.