@3 Are you will to pay triple the price for furniture and other finished wood products? It's all so easy to say until you get the bill.

Thanks for getting this story out . It's very important! With the effects of climate change, large rain events will become more frequent, which will also likely make tragedies like this more common in the future. We should be doing more to understand the causes and what we can do now to mitigate the risk of similar events.

Who are the Trust Beneficiaries?

I used to do quite a bit of driving around the Pacific and Grays Harbor counties, and saw firsthand the devastation caused by clearcuts in some fairly remote areas, including a landslide from a clearcut that closed highway 6 near Pe Ell for weeks on end. Make no mistake, clear cutting turns vibrant forest lands into biological deserts, and leaves the inhabitants who are dependent on resource extraction poorer and less educated than their urban counterparts. The idea that we should fund schools using clearcuts is insane, and companies like Weyerhaeuser have been leveraging that funding issue to continue their brutal practices, even though they've been steadily destroying both the economy and the ecology and concentrating ever more wealth with the rent seekers/shareholders. The locals are resentful toward the so-called 'enviros' 'greenies' 'tree huggers' and 'owl lovers' because of the regulations that were passed during the 70's, in part because the logging practices included logging right up to the creeks, choking salmon runs and destroying another valuable resource extraction industry, fishing. However, much of the logging industry has been steadily destroyed due to automation (it's much easier to use machinery to log if you can clearcut), industrial consolidation, and plant closures as Weyerhaeuser shipped their plants and saw mills to parts of the country where the labor costs were cheaper and non-unionized. During my time in that region, several plants were closed in Grays Harbor by Weyerhaeuser without much notice, and a lot of jobs were lost. Whatever is left is barely hanging on.

What we don't want to confront is that clearcutting is stupid, that shallow root systems and lack of canopy increases the likelihood that the soil will absorb more water more quickly and be more prone to landslides, and that clearcutting also contributes to the continued impoverishment and environmental devastation from an economy that no longer is sustainable. You can still see the stumps of the ancient cedar forest that used to exist, and the buckboards that loggers used on either side of the tree to saw it down by hand. The trees were huge, and magnificent. Now it's just a graveyard that no one wants to visit. If logging were returned to sustainable practices (i.e. no clearcutting), the lands pried from Weyerhaeuser's hands, and the funding for schools came from someplace other than resource extraction, the forest might have a chance to recover to their previous vibrant state. If nothing else, these forests help clean the air we rely on to breath, sequester carbon more efficiently than any engineer's scheme, and provide opportunities to hike, hunt, fish and observe the recovered species, but we can't do that if they're clearcut every 20 or 50 years.

its also odd how people were able to obtain home loans in this high risk area. it appears the last 2 homes purchased on steelhead drive were in 2011 and 2014. in both cases the "seller" was fannie mae and both homes had just been foreclosed on. in 2011 it appears the loan was a VA loan . both had title companies as "trustees" stewart title and fidelity national title. aren't they required to research high risks as this? not knowing all details it did appear these also might be filed under predatory loans?