![]() ![]() Kean hopes the new study’s results can help emergency managers plan out evacuation zones for landslides before they happen. A portion of Highway 1 near Big Sur was washed out in a landslide in late January after a severe rainstorm. The rainstorms that can trigger debris flows – they're kind of garden-variety storms.”Ĭalifornia’s central coast has already seen a significant landslide this year. “The reason you can expect one just about every year is because it doesn't take very much rain to cause one. And that's a bad recipe for these post-fire debris flows,” Kean said. “We're going to have a longer season to burn and then when it does rain, it's going to come down harder. The results also suggest more intense rainfall, which is likely to happen in the coming decades, could make landslides much more frequent.Ĭombined with recent research showing California’s wildfire season is getting longer and the rainy season is getting shorter and more intense, the new findings suggest Californians face a higher risk of wildfires and post-wildfire landslides that can damage property and endanger people’s lives. Major landslides capable of damaging 40 or more structures can be expected every 10 to 13 years – about as frequently as magnitude 6.7 earthquakes occur in California, according to the study. Their results show small landslides can now be expected to occur almost every year in southern California. Their goal was to map which regions of the state are most vulnerable to landslides before they happen, in a manner similar to how geologists map earthquake hazards. In the new study, Kean and his colleague combined historical fire, rainfall and landslide data with computer simulations to forecast where post-wildfire landslides are likely to occur in southern California, how big those landslides might be and how often they can be expected to happen. Geologists routinely conduct landslide hazard assessments after wildfires occur, but there is often not enough time between a fire and a rainstorm to implement an effective emergency response plan, Kean said. Wildfires make the landscape more susceptible to landslides when rainstorms pass through as the water liquefies unstable, dry soil and burned vegetation. ![]() “By proactively thinking about hazards, you can start to develop more detailed response plans for their inevitability.” ![]() The journal publishes interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants. “This is our attempt to get people thinking about where these hazards are going to occur before there's even a fire,” said Jason Kean, a hydrologist at the USGS in Denver and lead author of the new study in AGU’s journal Earth’s Future. The results show Californians are now facing a double whammy of increased wildfire and landslide risk caused by climate change-induced shifts in the state’s wet and dry seasons, according to researchers who mapped landslide vulnerability in the southern half of the state. Damage from a major post-wildfire landslide that occurred on 9 January 2018 near Montecito, Santa Barbara County as a result of the 2017 Thomas Fire. ![]()
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