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A cloudburst caused a flash flood in Uttarkashi, India.
[
It’s very sobering to watch those houses fold under the water.
W
People make fun of the largely needless layers of bureaucracy when it comes to zoning, utility, and building regulations and codes in the states, but I’m constantly reminded by videos like this that 99% of those laws exist for a very, very, very good reason. edit: I’m not saying codes and regs are somehow inherently perfect and that all residential zoning laws are necessary. I’m also not saying codes and regs outright prevent natural disasters, you donuts. I am however saying that US-style building code enforcement could have likely prevented *these* houses from being built *there* in the first place.
T
Father’s neighbour violated the zoning by building his shed and pool in a flood zone. He was bragging that the city can’t stop him and all. Well, I think it was 2 years later, the river came out of it’s bed, flooded the shed, softened the ground under the pool and damaging it. The water stopped just shy of the flood zone line. He tried to claim the insurances, denied. Then sued the city for mismanaging the river, denied. The city then came back on him and fined him for the zoning violation and the constructions without permits. That guy then tried to throw all his neighbour under the bus because some had buildings there, all flooded. BUT they were there a very long time ago and was grandfathered.
G
Regulations are written in blood. (Most of them, anyway, occasionally some are added by well-meaning but overzealous bureaucrats.)
W
Indeed. I think a lot about the tragedies that needed to exist in order for things like the FDA to be established. Another needlessly bureaucratic (and depending on your view, wickedly corrupt) federal government department in the states that meddles in just about everything imaginable when it comes to food production and sales, but is also entirely to thank for every time you’re able to open a gallon of milk and not see literal colonies of worms crawling inside.
3
I think the biggest issue is that the majority of American’s are ignorant to the entire political process, they believe the FDA (of any other alphabet org.) is corrupt yet simultaneously believe that agency operates independently. If the FDA or EPA or any other org. is corrupt it is because they have been enabled by the politicians we vote for…
R
I think the biggest issue is that the majority of Americans are ignorant to the horrors they face everyday because most of these agencies do thier job so well. They think the FDA isn’t needed because they or someone they know have never been poisoned and died from lysteria. They think vaccines aren’t needed because they or someone they know have never suffered or died from polio or smallpox or measles. These agencies have done so well that Americans alive today have never had to suffer or witness these horrors so they feel these agencies are no longer needed.
D
This goes for a lot of things. Labor, fascism, civil rights, etc etc. We didn’t make regulations and laws and fight a world war for fun.
I
We’re cutting down the trees our grandparents planted so we can look more tan
_
I hear intestinal parasites are great for weight loss…
T
They are! You used to be able to buy tapeworm eggs for this very purpose. They might also give you the “consumption” pallor that was also all the rage back then… Ucking Fidiots we were back then.
L
Back then?
H
Might as well start putting amphetamines back in weight loss products while we’re at it lmao
K
It’s the IT budget problem. “Why do we even pay these guys if we never have any issues?” You don’t have issues because your team knows what they are doing.
G
My county has an elected Soil and Water Commissioner. I have no idea what they do. So I keep voting for the incumbent because that sounds like the sort of job you only hear about when shit goes wrong.
A
Ha, that’s a perfect comparison. When the regulations and everything keep people safe, it’s easy to just point to the few one-off problems and go “See, these are all such a pain in the ass!” because it’s easy to do that, and difficult if not impossible to say “Yeah, but look how many catastrophes we’ve avoided thanks to these same things!”. I always think of the whole “Swiss Cheese” concept in air disasters, where every layer of safety and redundancy gives you another slice of “Swiss cheese” to make it harder for all of the holes to line up and for disaster to occur. It’s easy to say “Oh, this one’s too restrictive” or “This one doesn’t even do anything. How often does that even happen?” but they’re all another layer of safety that could be the one thing preventing a tragedy.
K
There’s also the American mindset where if an organization doesn’t do what they want when they want, or if an organization needs money to run, it must be corrupt.
G
Or if they don’t understand what it does, it’s unnecessary.
V
Or there’s one particular agency that they don’t like, so they just blame the entire “government”, or the closest person in charge, or whatever agency they already happened to not like. “I have to get a building permit for this, dammit Obama! I hate the DEC environmental bullshit”. Like, no, zoning laws are created and enforced at the local level. If you don’t like it, you can try and convince the local zoning board to approve you, change the type of zone you’re in, or get convince the town board members to change the zoning laws. There may be county, state, or federal restriction in place that the zoning laws are based on, but it’s usually a governing policy that the actual procedures are written following. There’s room for interpretation. And the DEC is actually the NYDEC, which is state, and not federal, and probably had absolutely nothing to do with Obama or the federal government. That was a hypothetical, but the amount of people I’ve spoken with that have a similar mentality is unreal.
W
> If the FDA or EPA or any other org. is corrupt it is because they have been enabled by the politicians we vote for… Won’t find any argument from me on this particular viewpoint. I couldn’t agree more, now more than ever.
G
You’re also lumping in the FDA and EPA with other alphabet organizations like the security apparatus that are legitimately dangerous. Like, I’m sure the vast majority of people at the FDA are trying to do the right thing. Not the case at the NSA, though.
B
Most non-law enforcement governtment agencies are surprising non-corrupt. Most un-elected civil servants take their job seriously and treat the public as their boss
_
Regulations are like any safety measure: useless when nothing bad happens and useless still when something bad happens anyway and people ask why they weren’t doing more. It’s no-win. It’s like seatbelts. People bitch about them and don’t feel like they’re needed but when they save their life all they see is that the seat belt crushed their ribs. They fail to see that they would be dead without it.
K
People also like to argue about “Well then I’ll be dead” as though your 100-200 lb+ body hurtling though the glass and into the person you hit doesn’t happen. It’s not just the person wearing the seat belt being saved, it’s anyone else who might get caught up in it too.
D
Need I remind you of [Kotoku Wamura](https://mymodernmet.com/kotoku-wamura-fudai-floodgate/)
E
Thanks. This is great
B
And birth defects
[
I agree, but parking minimums are written in milkshakes and french fries
G
Or someone’s crooked brother in law. But for the most part, codes are there for a reason.
T
And some are written in greed
F
> (Most of them, anyway, occasionally some are added by well-meaning but overzealous bureaucrats.) I’d say it’s the other way around. Most are written by lobbyists, them many more are written by well meaning bureaucrats, and there’s a decent chunk that are written in blood. This is a problem because people see the lobbyist ones, and the well meaning but bad ones, and they start to discount or ignore them, including the ‘written in blood’ ones, which then get lumped together since it can be qute hard to distinguish them, often with disastrous consequences.
L
That’s because it’s functionally impossible to distinguish them. By “functionally”, I mean “actually get political consensus about a thing”. The same interests that put a reg in are almost certainly still around, lurking, waiting to rear up and sling mud and stones at anyone who tampers with their already conquered ground.
Z
And sometimes by bureaucrats whose brother-in-laws own sprinkler installation companies 🙂
S
And yet we still manage to build summer camps for children in dry riverbeds. Looking at you, Texas.
S
That’s because Texas has aggressively deregulated/privatized everything because freedumb. See also: people freezing to death in their homes.
F
That’s also why Houston got absolutely fucked by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Apparently letting everyone pave 2,000 sq mi with zero thought to natural drainage in a hurricane prone area is a bad idea, and gets even worse when the earth warms up. But hey at least [now we won’t see them coming.](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-lasting-threat-of-trumps-cuts-to-noaa-and-nws-on-american-communities/)
M
Not to mention all of the homes (new and old) just flat-out built in flood zones. Like why the hell would you build houses on the banks of bayous, rivers, creeks and reservoirs?!?? In a swamp land no less?!
I
You’re making his point lol. Texas screams deregulation from the mountain tops till something like this flood of the winter without power they went through. Then it’s “thoughts and prayers,” and shame on anyone for “politicizing” it.
[
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S
yeah and we’ve learned a lot in 100 years, so maybe we should have realized we can make changes to old things that werent great ideas to begin with.
[
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S
I didnt say destroy people’s property? I’m agreeing with you, they should have had some form of alarm system setup or address the issue in some form. That’s all ive been saying. You learn something about 100 years and you make an adjustment. Not everything is just burning people’s houses down that arent to code.
S
> You can’t use zoning laws or new regulations to force people to destroy their property. Not addressing anything else in your statement, but new regulations can render a property legally unusable. Not everything is grandfathered in
D
Here’s some useful contextual information that probably won’t change your point of view, but those who are able to let new information inform their worldview may find this edifying: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/12/camp-mystic-flood-plain-FEMA/
S
Don’t confuse codes with zoning.
N
For sure. In this case however I think that water is taking our most houses, at least the first few that were hit. That water was moving FAST and with a lot of volume. The first few that got hit were going down no matter what imo, no matter how they were built.
B
it’s not about how they were built but about where they were built. such as, in the path of a dried mountain river bed that shifts with time/volume we say ohh regulations but we just had a camp flood on a river for similar reasons and we all were like, why was that allowed to be built there?
T
Every major deadly flood related incident in recent memory featured plenty of places with pretty extensive zoning laws yet they still happened. The power of water is routinely underestimated to the point major rivers still claim drowning victims in the double digits each year. Giving a river space to swell flies in the face of many that want waterfront property. Restricting rivers into channels is quite common because surely an engineer calculated if it’s fine right? Right?.. Fact is this will continue to happen if the approach towards dealing with rivers is to think we can estimate and control the worst possible scenarios. Such thinking has lead to some of the worst disasters in history, yet we continue to be rather bad at learning from them collectively.
N
Problem is, conservatives are incapable of dealing in shades of gray. In their view, either every single regulation has to exist for a very, very good reason, or else there should be no regulations at all. Finding one single example of an overreaching or self-serving regulation, and they scream government overreach.
J
euclidian zoning is worth making fun of though.
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