Residents evacuated from seaside homes teetering on the brink as California cliffs crumble into the ocean amid violent El Nino storms

Take a look at the glorious photos at the link showing many, many homes built right at the edge of cliffs in California.

I grew up not far from the Mississippi river in Illinois. Seemingly every year the Mississippi or one of its tributaries would bloat out of its banks, flooding numerous homes. My question then as now was “who thought it was a good idea to build a house someplace you *know* will try to kill you, sooner or later?”

Thing is, a lot of the houses along the banks or the Rock River were built on stilts three or more feet high. This was enough to lift them above century-level flood stages, though of course every now and then a 500-year flood would come along and make a mess of things. But flooding is something that cane be seen coming, and the damage is, while often devastating, generally not very dramatic. But the ground on which your home is built simply crashing into the sea a hundred feet below? That’s hard to top. River floods rarely come out of nowhere; when the heavy rains come, you can have hours to day to gather your bits and git. But an earthquake comes out of nowhere, and a house built on a cliff can simply vanish into a cloud of dust and a pile of rubble.

Additionally… back home the houses down by the river were often not much better than a van down by the river. But in California, houses costing millions seems to spring up like shrooms on the edges of cliffs and on the sides of hills made out of mud. Madness.