Pacific Coast Apartments Are About to Fall Off a Cliff

Plenty of people love the idea of living in a house or apartment close to the ocean. It’s safe to say that nobody likes the idea of their house or apartment actually tumbling into the ocean, but that’s precisely the situation that’s facing residents of an apartment complex in Pacifica, Calif.

They find themselves living closer and closer to the sea as the 80-foot cliff on which their dwellings are perched crumbles away. And yet remarkably, at least some of them are reluctant to move away.

Both the scale of the problem and the determination of the residents are vividly highlighted in the video below. At around the 30-second mark, a chunk of cliff collapses into the sea; yet, later on, the video shows people calmly smoking on their balcony.

The Pacifica cliffs have been crumbling for decades, but the pace has steadily increased as sediment from the San Francisco Bay, which sustained the beaches and protected the cliffs, has been greatly reduced by damming, water diversion and dredging. Increasing sea level rise will only exacerbate the problem; but by then, the buildings will likely be long gone.

“I filmed a small portion of a very large problem with that city,” Duncan Sinfield, an assignment editor at KTVU told The New York Times. “It’s got to be happening a lot more often. We’re just not seeing it.”

Read more at Discovery News