inadequate blame

On the BC Provincial Government website there is a page called Cariboo Road Recovery Projects that discusses the status of repairs due to a number of highway landslides near Quesnel. No surprise that they blame the slope failures on Climate Change:

As we witness the effects of climate change across the province, the Cariboo is being particularly hard hit by changing weather patterns. The very wet spring and summer months of the past couple of years, combined with the snow melt and impacts of wildfires, has brought more water into the ground than normal and caused unprecedented slides and road washouts in 2020 and 2021.

Countering with input from anti-logging interests, a recent CBC news piece called Logging, forest loss may have set ancient B.C. landslides back in motion, experts say, presents an alternate theory that widespread clear cutting is more responsible. However, looking at the 10 slide sites on Google Maps (other than a treeless field above the Durrell Road location) there is no indication that poor forestry practices had any role to play in the multiple slope failures.
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One factor common to the washouts (other than Highway 20 at Williams Lake) are roads built into steep terrain influenced by river escarpment or ravines. A commenter on the CBC story probably has it right:

It's slump block failure, with the scarps kilometers long and the better part of over a hundred meters deep. The geology underneath is one glorified silt and sand layercake of Oligocene to Pliocene sediments with clay at the bottom. I've walked and mapped them. The Fraser keeps cutting the toe and the clay keeps moving. Gravity is the real culprit. There will be variation in rate but it's continuously moving. "Climate Change" is a red herring. Logging doesn't help but it really only affects the near surface material after the 'basement' has already moved. Short of suspending the Law of Gravity and running the Fraser River through a pipe, that region is going to experience slump failure for centuries yet, just like it has since the retreat of the last ice sheet. The terraced topography of the area, especially in the Fraser River valley, is a creation of that slumping. Nothing we do is going to make it stop.

Climate Change is indeed a red herring, used in this case to soften public sentiment and excuse poorly routed highway engineering. Environment Canada data for Quesnel Airport shows that spring/summer rain, as well as annual precipitation, has actually been decreasing when you compare the last decade against the 1981 – 2010 norms.

It was wetter than usual in June/July 2020 (204.4 mm) while 2021 was drier than normal. The summer rain in 2020 was obviously a factor for the landslides, but was this just variable weather or was it a change in climate? June/July precipitation in 1955 (223.2 mm) exceeded the 2020 amount, so a burp of even-more-powerful Climate Change must have taken place way back then too.

Wrong … it’s obvious that 2 month aberrations are not Climate Change. The only question concerning the government’s false blame is, are they are purposely misleading us to cover up their current inadequacies, or just bolstering the list of problems attributed to CO2 emissions in order to cover up their future inadequacies elsewhere?
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