avalanches

[David La Chapelle <dlachape@ptialaska.net>]

I live in a city with the largest urban avalanche path in country. The
slide has run several times this century all the way to the water and
left debris on the island across the channel from the city. The
evidence is clear that the avalanche has run, the record of its
running is common knowledge, the slide path has been studied numerous
times and the city has all of the conclusions in their library. The
conclusions are the same: don't build under a known avalanche path.

If you drive up the road from my home you will see houses packed into
the avalanche zone, a motel, the edge of the only highschool in town
and a marina.

The homeowners will tell you that it must be ok because everyone else
has built there. And besides its been years since anything has
happened.

Juneau was founded by miners who wanted the gold in the mountains. The
natives in the area lived in a beautiful, sheltered, cove with plenty
of flat land around them. Downtown Juneau has horrendous winter winds
called Takus, little land to develop, and constant mudslide and
avalanche danger. A town built on maximum gain: go where you can get
rich and damn the topography.

The current dwellers under the avalanche live in a climate of maximum
gain (build where expedient, don't consider the environment around you
and point to everyone else who is doing it) which will be rudely
corrected by nature sometime soon.

the early programmers built houses which bugs in their foundation
because the climate of maximum gain defined the "environment" around
them. To say that the Y2k problem was opaque to corporate policy IS
exactly why Y2k is an emanation of Max-gain. If corporations were not
blinded by max-gain they would survey their terrain with more
diligence and understanding and the widely reported gulf between IT
and management would have been bridged in a more communicative
environment. The speed of corporate decision making precluded the
careful assessment of internal reality necessary for proper
orientation in the world.

There are houses of IT cards built under avalanche paths all over the
world precisely because of a climate of productivity which did not
listen well to warning signs.