Hello again

Hi! It's been a year, huh? Big year! I was published in Outside, Smithsonian, Slate and some other cool places. Google also locked me out of this blog, and I just figured out how to get back in. I'm undecided whether I'll keep posting here... I have my hands full as it is. In the meantime, visit my real website at www.kristaleelanglois.com. Thanks!

Here's an adorable picture of my dog,  just to cap things off.

Canada's mining boom spills into Alaskan waters.

Carrie James’ story ought to sound familiar: She grew up in a small town on the Alaskan coast, fishing for salmon the way her Haida and Tlingit ancestors had for generations. She taught her children, two boys and a girl, how to catch, smoke and put up the fish. And then, as with so many other salmon-based tribes, plans for upstream development began to threaten her way of life.

But unlike some Pacific Northwest tribes, which have lately negotiated with hydroelectric companies to repair some of the damage caused by dams — or tribes in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, which at least have the Environmental Protection Agency on their side in the fight over Pebble Mine — James has felt powerless in her effort to stop a handful of mines from being dug in the headwaters of rivers that feed her tribe and economy. That’s because the headwaters aren’t in Alaska. They’re in Canada.

Over the last decade, the Canadian government has expedited a mining boom in western British Columbia by rolling back one environmental regulation after another. The Navigable Waters Protection Act, for example, once protected more than a million Canadian rivers and 32,000 lakes. As of 2012, that number was down to just 66, leaving some of British Columbia’s wildest, richest and largest rivers exempt from environmental safeguards.

...Keep reading here. 

Cheap oil is saving Alaskan ecosystems -- for now.

Courtesy National Park Service

It’s hard to find a place more remote than Bettles, Alaska. The village of 15 people lies 35 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Koyukuk River, accessible to the outside world only by an ice road, boat or plane. And 69-year-old mayor Gary Hanchett likes it that way. “I love the country,” he says in a slow, gravelly voice. “To this day I don’t see myself ever living south of the (Yukon).” 

But former Governor Sean Parnell targeted the region around Bettles for one of a handful of “mega-projects,” huge developments meant to create jobs and tap into Alaska’s untouched resources. In this case, the resource was copper, and the project a 220-mile long mining road that would cross more than 100 streams and rivers, countless acres of tundra and wetlands, and Gates of the Arctic National Park. It would also trundle right past Hanchett’s house, bringing exhaust fumes and possibly asbestos dust to a place where he usually smokes fish.

Hanchett has been doggedly fighting the proposed Ambler Road for more than two years. But the best news he’s gotten came on Jan. 22, when newly-elected Independent Governor Bill Walker unveiled his 2016 budget plan: All funding for the road had been cut. 

Similar controversial developments, including the plan to build a 735-foot-tall hydropower dam across the salmon-rich Susitna River, were also axed...

...Keep reading here. 

Unwelcome ungulates: Do mountain goats belong in Utah?

The La Sal Mountains rise from the slickrock canyons and dry mesas of the Colorado Plateau like a mirage, an island of alpine peaks in a sea of desert. Just 15 miles from the adventure tourism hub of Moab, the mountains are blissfully cool, even in summer, and nearly empty of people.

To Barb Smith, a 52-year-old Forest Service wildlife biologist with striking green eyes and a silvery braid, the upper La Sals are an ecological paradise, one of the few chunks of land in Utah that isn’t grazed, logged or scarred by off-road vehicles. Smith is also a botanist, and as she and a dozen or so volunteers climb above 11,000-foot Burro Pass, she rattles off the Latin names of flowers:Polygonum bistortoides, Tetraneuris grandiflora. There are so many, it’s hard to take a step without crushing one.

We pause on a wind-scoured slope to catch our breaths and everyone crowds around Smith, who has spotted a cute if unremarkable yellow button called the La Sal daisy. She explains how to identify the flower and mark its location on a GPS. “This kind of effort, this kind of documentation, is going to be really helpful,” she says. The volunteers hold out their smartphones to take pictures.

Read the rest of the story here.

How Native Americans shaped -- or more often, didn't shape -- the year's biggest environmental debates.

Flickr user Arbyreed

This September, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans began receiving checks in the mail. The money was the final installment of the Cobell settlement, which altogether paid out $3.4 billion in overdue royalties to compensate for more than a century of poorly managed mining on reservations. Two months later, Montana’s Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes moved a step closer to closing a deal that will make them the first in the nation to own a hydroelectric dam. 

Such stories stand out, because though Native Americans have deep stakes in some of the West’s most pointed environmental debates, their voices continue to be more often marginalized or outright ignored by state and federal lawmakers. The past year has been no exception. Last week, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, incensed Native activists when he undermined decades of progress toward sovereignty and told an Apache leader that Native Americans are “still wards of the federal government.”

As we head into 2015, here’s a look back at how Western tribes shaped — or tried to shape — some of the year’s biggest natural resource stories...

...Click here to keep reading. 

Drilling the Arctic comes with a 75 percent chance of a large oil spill

Imagine an oil spill off the coast of San Diego. Now imagine the nearest port from which to launch an emergency response is in Seattle, more than a thousand miles away, and that San Diego is suddenly bereft of grocery stores, leaving most residents dependent on the ocean for sustenance. Then take the Southern California ocean in your mind’s eye, increase the biomass, encase it in ice, bathe in darkness for a few months, and sprinkle with polar bears. That’s what an oil spill in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea would look like.

Arctic sea ice.

NASA/Kathryn Hansen

Whether such a spill has a chance to happen is largely dependent on what the Interior Department does with a draft Environmental Impact Statement released this month by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The report examines Lease 193, a controversial sale that, in 2012, enabled Shell to drill the first exploratory wells in the Chukchi in decades. Since then, drilling has been held up by Shell’s own grave missteps and by a series of lawsuits, which prompted an appeals court this January to throw out the previous environmental impact statement because it cited an “arbitrary and capricious” amount of recoverable oil....

Read the rest here. 

Why are Hopi rangers impounding Navajo sheep?

Caroline Tohannie is an 84-year-old great-grandmother who raises sheep and weaves traditional Navajo textiles in northern Arizona. On Oct. 22, her sheep were confiscated. 

Tohannie has lived her entire life on Black Mesa, an arid, tawny chunk of land once veined with glittering coal and now studded with slag heaps and waste ponds. Both Hopi and Navajo claim it among their ancestral homelands; before Europeans showed up, the tribes’ relationship was “one largely of peaceful co-existence and intertribal cooperation,” writes historian and Navajo activist John Redhouse. The Hopi lived in agricultural villages atop the mesa, while the more transient Navajo grazed their livestock below.

When the U.S. government forced Navajo into internment in the 1860s, those who managed to escape fled to what’s now Hopi land at Black Mesa. Later, encroachment from white settlers forced more Navajo onto the Hopi reservation, and what eventually became an ongoing, century-long land dispute was birthed. It culminated in the 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, which drew an arbitrary line down the center of Black Mesa, splitting it between the two tribes. Navajos living on Hopi land were forced to relocate, as were Hopi living on Navajo land. 

Ultimately, more than 12,000 Navajos were forced from their homes, compared to just 100 or so Hopis. It was the largest forced relocation since the 1880s. 

But some Navajo families refused to leave....

Read the rest here. 

A bright spot for climate activists in an otherwise dismal election.

Matt Isenhower was sick of sitting in traffic. As the 34-year-old Navy veteran from Redmond, Washington, van-pooled 80 minutes to and from his job at Amazon in Seattle each day, he had plenty of time to lament the state Senate’s refusal to invest in mass transit. Roughly 58 percent of Washington’s carbon emissions come from the tailpipes of cars, trucks and other vehicles, and the Republican-controlled Senate had also stymied Gov. Jay Inslee’s attempts to forge a bipartisan agreement to limit greenhouse gasses.

Hoping to end the gridlock, Isenhower decided to run for state Senate. With his freshly shaven good looks, military background and Harvard MBA, Democrats thought Isenhower had a good shot at unseating Republican Andy Hill. And in this election year, that was a big deal: If liberals could take just two seats in Washington’s Senate, Inslee — a clean-energy champion and one of America’s greenest governors — would have a pro-environment majority in both chambers. There’s no doubt what he could do with that kind of opportunity: Next year, Inslee hopes to release a sweeping plan that could make Washington the second state in the nation (after California) to slash carbon emissions across the economy by putting a price on them....

Read the rest here. 

Virus implicated in sea star wasting disease

Last fall, after millions of West Coast starfish were found dead and dying, a team of 25 microbiologists, epidemiologists, marine biologists and other scientists from around the country set out to determine what was killing them. Now they have an answer — and even more questions. 

Here’s what they know: The culprit responsible for one of the most deadly marine diseases ever recorded is a type of densovirus, a microbe that usually attacks crickets and other insects. While scientists had never associated densovirus with marine invertebrates before, it’s been in the ocean for at least 72 years: The researchers found traces of the virus in ethanol-preserved starfish specimens from the 1940s and in healthy sea urchins alive today in Hawaii. 

But here’s what they don’t yet know: If the virus has been around for so long, why did it go from benign microbe to purveyor of an epidemic that, since June 2013, has caused up to 95 percent of local sea star populations from Baja California to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula to dissolve into puddles of goo, altering the makeup of intertidal ecosystems for years to come? 

... Read the rest here. 

Blog dump, part the second

Guys! I am the worst at updating this. I'll do better, I swear.

A few High Country News blogs from the last month:


1. If you spent any time on the internet last week, you probably saw the photos: A giant, roiling mass of 35,000 walrus crowded onto a beach in northwest Alaska. The photos, captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were featured on the BBC, the Associated Press and more Twitter and Facebook feeds than anyone could count.

Most reports — with the exception of a few ultra-conservative sites — decisively linked the record numbers of on-shore walrus to record low sea ice offshore, and overnight, the walrus became an international symbol of climate change. The New York Times called the situation a “walrus crisis,” and NBC News reported that it was a “ very visual sign of what wildlife scientists know and worry about: From the Arctic to Antarctica, some species are having to adapt, or die, in the face of the long-term threat of a warming planet.”

But two walrus experts currently using a National Science Foundation grant to analyze recent, historic and prehistoric walrus samples to piece together the species’ 4,000-year history say that we don’t understand enough about “normal” walrus behavior to know whether the massive haul-out is, in fact, unusual....

http://www.hcn.org/articles/the-walrus-detectives


2. For all the strides female firefighters have made in the last few decades, wildland firefighting is still, at it’s heart, a men’s club. Only 10 percent of wildland firefighters in the U.S. are women, and across the West, recruitment and retention are ongoing challenges. Yet nowhere is this more evident than in California, where a series of lawsuits meant to get more women onto the front lines have seemingly backfired, leaving women in what some argue are worse straits than before.....

http://www.hcn.org/articles/california-women-threaten-to-sue-the-forest-service-again


3. If you live in a city, the U.S. Geological Survey has some bad news for you: There’s a good chance your water is contaminated. A USGS study released earlier this month monitored more than 200 streams from 1992 to 2011 and found that the number of urban waterways contaminated with pesticides increased from 53 percent in the 1990s to 90 percent the following decade. Most pollutants were found at levels only harmful to aquatic life like fish, frogs and insects, while the number of streams with contaminant levels that pose a risk to human health actually dropped. Yet new chemicals are still permeating the environment and our understanding of their negative effects is limited.

Still, the USGS study is the country’s most comprehensive assessment of water quality to date, and it does offer some good news — or at least, what passes for good news on the environmental beat.

http://www.hcn.org/articles/rural-rivers-get-cleaner-urban-streams-are-full-of-pesticides


4. It’s rare that a piece of legislation containing the word “wilderness” stands a chance in Congress these days, so when I was invited to fly over a proposed 37,000-acre parcel in southwest Colorado that could actually make it onto the president’s desk, I jumped at the chance. The fact that it was a crisp, clear autumn morning I would have otherwise spent in front of a computer really had nothing to do with it, I swear....

http://www.hcn.org/articles/how-to-pass-a-wilderness-bill-in-2014

Blog dump!

Between moving, traveling, getting engaged and becoming a dog owner, I've been terribly remiss in keeping this thing updated. Here are a few of my latest stories for High Country News:

1. Sweeping new rule for Alaska's predator control: Federal versus state wildlife politics get even hotter.

When Jim Stratton, deputy vice president for the National Parks Conservation Association, heard last week that the National Park Service had announced a sweeping new rule banning the manipulation of predators and prey in Alaska’s national preserves, his reaction was — to put it mildly — unfettered joy. “This is totally exciting news,” he says. “I’ve only been working this for ten years. Game on.”

The reaction of the state Division of Wildlife Conservation? A little more tepid. Director Doug Vincent-Lang sees any attempt by the feds to usurp Alaska’s wildlife management authority as overreach, and this new rule — which maintains hunting rights on Alaska’s 22 million acres of national preserves but bans certain controversial practices — is overreach at its worst: “unfounded and unjust,” he told Alaska Dispatch News.

The proposed rule is currently up for public comments, and will likely be implemented next year. It prohibits the baiting of brown bears, the killing of wolves and coyotes when pups are in tow, and the use of artificial light to kill black bears in their dens. It also pre-emptively prohibits any other practice “with the intent or potential to alter or manipulate natural predator-prey dynamics.” In other words, killing predators to boost ungulate populations will no longer be allowed in Alaska’s national preserves.

To understand just how big this is, it helps to backtrack to 2002, when former Republican governor Frank Murkowski took office...

As always, to read the entire story, just click here. 

Photo courtesy John Burch

2. The nice folks at the National Parks Conservation Association hooked me up with former Alaskan governor Tony Knowles for his take on Alaskan wildlife management and the new rule. Read my interview with him here.


3. Manmade quakes shake the Southwest: Tremors in Colorado and New Mexico linked to coalbed methane extraction.

Colorado, northern New Mexico and even western Kansas felt their beds shake. Historic buildings crumbled and chunks of mountainsides slid onto highways, but no injuries were reported in the 5.3 magnitude quake that the New York Times deemed “the largest natural earthquake in Colorado in more than a century.”

Except that it wasn’t natural at all. A study released Monday in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America confirms what scientists have suspected for years: That the 2011 quake — along with dozens of others in the Raton Basin of Colorado and New Mexico — were caused by a byproduct of coalbed methaneextraction. Other studies have made similar connections in Oklahoma and Ohio, but this is the first to conclusively link oil and gas development with increased earthquake frequency in the Southwest.

It also skews the popular notion that fracking alone is responsible for tremors in oil and gas country. U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist Bill Barnhart, who reviewed the study and has worked in the Raton Basin, emphasizes that the human-induced seismicity there is “completely unrelated” to fracking.

Instead, the culprit is coalbed methane extraction — or, more specifically, the wastewater it produces...

Again, to read the whole thing, click here.

Alaskan cruise ship passengers to get a dose of climate change education

Two big things have happened since John Neary arrived in Alaska's rainy capital city 33 years ago: Juneau's most famous attraction, the Mendenhall Glacier, has receded by more than a mile; and the number of visitors to the glacier has nearly tripled, to 450,000 a year. “On Monday afternoons, the busses are lined up 30 deep,” Neary says. “The place is not suited to the volume of traffic it's receiving.”

The surge can largely be explained by an increase in Alaskan tourism over the last few decades. But visitors have more than doubled in the past 16 years alone, and at least part of that can be attributed to “last chance tourism,” or the flow of people rushing to see at-risk places before they're destroyed by climate change....

Read the rest here: https://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/alaskan-cruise-ship-passengers-to-get-a-dose-of-climate-change-education

Grizzlies gain ground

Joe Scott remembers when Washington state banned the transportation of grizzlies back in 1995 — he still keeps a copy of the law by his desk and jokes that he uses it as a dartboard from time to time. “It was very emotional,” he says. “I remember getting red in the face testifying (against the law) in front of the state Senate committee. I lost my temper, and the chair just kind of stared at me wide-eyed.”

Scott, international conservation director for the nonprofit Conservation Northwest, has been passionate about large predators for as long as he can remember. So when state legislators introduced that bill, preventing wildlife officials from bringing in new grizzlies to augment the state’s rapidly dwindling population, Scott was outraged.

To others, though, the idea of bolstering grizzly populations is dangerous — and contentious. A proposal to reintroduce bears to Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains in 2000 spurred death threats, and a biologist who suggested bringing new bears to help the population of Washington’s North Cascades was spat on at a public meeting. Now, under the law that Scott testified against, Washington wildlife managers are encouraged to support grizzlies’ “natural regeneration,” but barred from transplanting or introducing them.

So will grizzlies ever regain a foothold beyond Yellowstone and Glacier national parks?... 

My latest for High Country News, and it's up on our brand new website! http://www.hcn.org/articles/grizzlies-gain-ground

Boreal burning

Rumbling afternoon thundershowers are breaking over the Southwest, bringing gratitude and sweet relief – not that the region needed much relieving this year. Bouts of cool, wet weather throughout early summer helped stave off the conflagrations predicted to erupt after a dry winter, and by mid-July, most areas had already been deluged by a full month’s worth of rainfall. In other words, summer monsoon season has extinguished any lingering fears that 2014 would be a bad fire year.

But as the Southwest collectively inhales the smell of rain falling on dry land, parts of the Northwest and Western Canada are bathed in acrid smoke. Nearly a million acres are burning in Washington and Oregon alone – more than what typically burns over the course of a whole year. Some 12,000 firefighters have been deployed since the fires began earlier this month.

Yet though the deadly combination of drought and summer lightning strikes have led to a particularly severe fire season in eastern Washington and Oregon, some of the West’s biggest blazes are in Canada's Northwest Territories, where the total acreage burned so far this year is six times the 25-year average. In recent years, twice as much Canadian forest has been burning annually as in the 1970s, says University of Alberta wildland fire professor Mike Flannigan, and the northwestern part of the country is experiencing its hottest, driest summer in half a century. “What we are seeing in the Northwest Territories this year is an indicator of what to expect with climate change,” Flannigan says...

To read more about what burning boreal forests mean for the environment, click here. 

More fun with photoshop.

Grasshopper plagues: agricultural nightmare or ecological boon?

In early June, meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were puzzled: There was a big splotch on the radar that didn’t look like any weather system they’d ever seen. Maybe their software had a bug?

Turns out, the dark green blob hovering over Albuquerque wasn’t a software glitch at all but a giant swarm of grasshoppers. John Garlisch, an agricultural extension agent at New Mexico State University, told Modern Farmer that the state’s dry winter allowed more grasshopper eggs than usual to hatch this spring, and the ongoing drought has caused a dearth of fresh growth on rural rangeland, forcing the swarm to take flight in search of greener pastures. The well-watered gardens of Albuquerque must’ve looked mighty appealing.

By now, the grasshoppers have mostly died of natural causes or been eaten by cats, says forecaster Brent Wachter of the National Weather Service. But this summer’s incident raises the question: As climate change continues to impact weather patterns across the West, will grasshopper swarms big enough to show up on Doppler radar become a more regular concern? And if so, how concerned should we be?

To find out, I called population ecologist Gary Belovsky, who’s been studying grasshoppers in western Montana for 37 years. He's currently researching how climate change affects grasshopper outbreaks. If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward answer, though – something along the lines of “climate change causes drought and drought causes more grasshoppers” – look elsewhere. While drought can indeed increase short-term grasshopper populations, the picture Belovsky paints over the long run is far more complex. ...

... Click here to read the rest.

More Pebble Mine - Alaska sides with mining corp., tribes back EPA

Victories in clean air and energy politics may be among the Obama Administration’s lasting legacies, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t been getting much love from rural communities lately. Here in western Colorado coal-mining country, a hand-painted sign reflects the opinion of many local miners: “Frack the EPA and the war on energy!” In Idaho last week, demonstrators illegally dredged a protected stretch of the Salmon River to protest EPA permits for mining in Western watersheds. Since January, Kansas and seven other rural states have passed symbolic measures opposing the EPA’s new power-plant emission standards, and since 2010 Texas has spent millions in taxpayer dollars on more than a dozen (mostly unsuccessful) lawsuits against the agency.

Yet in rural Alaska, where sentiment against federal oversight runs deep, a group of remote residents are actually siding with the EPA. Not only that, they’re joining the agency in fighting a powerful lawsuit filed against it.

That’s the latest news in the saga of Pebble Mine, a massive open-pit copper mine proposed in western Alaska’s Bristol Bay region. Local tribes and commercial fishermen fear the mine could destroy one of the world’s most prolific salmon runs, and in 2010, tribes petitioned the EPA to invoke a seldom-used power under the Clean Water Act to block development. This April, after a federal environmental assessment concluded the mine could indeed harm salmon habitat, the EPA took the first steps to begin using the Clean Water Act to halt the mine. ...


... Click here to read the rest.

changing seasons.

When you choose to spend the summer solstice at 11,000 feet, there is likely to be snow. Taken in the Ice Lakes basin, San Juan National Forest, southwest Colorado.

W

Mushy starfish and washed-up sea lions

Here’s some shocking news: Since last fall, when I first wrote about Pacific sea stars falling victim to a mysterious disease, turning into goo and dying, the aptly-named “starfish wasting syndrome” has not – as scientists hoped – subsided on its own. It’s gotten much, much worse.

How much worse, you ask? Well, from the get-go, this iteration of starfish wasting was more widespread and severe than previous outbreaks, which have historically spiked during warm-water El Niño years and then quickly subsided. By the time it was identified late last summer, the disease had already caused localized die-offs of up to 95 percent of ochre sea stars in Santa Cruz, California, and was spotted as far north as Alaska. Tens of thousands of starfish simply wasted away and died, literally before researchers’ eyes.

Yet it seemed for a while that Washington and Oregon would be spared. This May, just over 1 percent of ochre sea stars in Oregon were affected. But now – a mere four weeks later – an estimated 30 to 50 percent are dying, and scientists predict a 100 percent mortality rate in some places. In parts of Washington’s San Juan Islands, mortality jumped from 10 to 40 percent over the course of a single week in June, and the disease has now been confirmed in more than a dozen species. “This is an unprecedented event,” says Bruce Menge, a marine biologist at Oregon State University. “We’ve never seen anything of this magnitude before.”

By now, you might well be wondering what’s behind this intertidal horror show. Funny you should ask. Though the outbreak has prompted a slew of research and emergency funding from the National Science Foundation, no one really knows. We’re 11 months into an epidemic that could wreak havoc on entire ecosystems from Mexico to Alaska, and we can’t pin down the cause. It’s like the bubonic plague is striking our oceans, and we’re stuck in the dark ages...

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/dying-starfish-washed-up-sea-lions-and-other-marine-diseases-leave-too-many-questions

Mudslide!

It looked like lava and sounded like a freight train. That’s how locals described the sea of mud and debris that flowed down the green foothills of western Colorado’s Grand Mesa on Sunday afternoon, carving a path of destruction 3 miles long and a half-mile wide. Three men missing from nearby Collbran are presumed dead; rescue efforts have been halted by mud that’s up to 250 feet deep; and though the slide occurred in a rural area away from most homes, it came within 25 feet of a natural gas drilling pad with three active wells.

“It’s an understatement to say it’s massive,” Mesa County Sheriff Stan Hilkey said in a press conference on Monday. For comparison, the mudslide that captured national attention and killed 43 people in Oso, Washington, in March covered one square mile. The Mesa County slide was eight times that size, and the biggest difference appears to have been luck: unlike in Oso, residents of Collbran simply hadn’t built homes in the path of natural disaster.

The county’s oil and gas wells, however, are a different story. Though the mud just barely missed a drill pad operated by Occidental Petroleum Corporation, 16 additional wells sit below the current slide, and Mesa County isn’t in the clear just yet. Temperatures are expected to reach 85 degrees Wednesday afternoon, kicking snowmelt into high gear and increasing the risk of another slide. “There’s an unofficial consensus that an additional slide is likely,” says David Ludlam, executive director of the West Slope Colorado Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group.
 
Lynn Highland, a geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Landslide Information Center, agrees that a second slide is a real possibility. She also underscores what High Country News contributing editor Judith Lewis-Mernit recently pointed out: There’s no database of the thousands of precarious hillsides looming over homes and infrastructure in the West. The last national map of landslide risk was released in 1982, and as climate change increases the frequency of the freak rainfall and rapid snowmelt that lead to giant mudslides, the map has grown obsolete, Highland says...

... Read the rest here: http://www.hcn.org/articles/colorado-mudslide-reveals-risks-in-energy-planning-1