Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, I did not have an easy time learning to ride a bike. My neighborhood was called "Rolling Knolls," and indeed the knolls were rolling. I could not get one street away without encountering a formidable hill, one big enough to exhaust a child after biking up it one time. Given its title of "The City of Seven Hills" (there are WAY more), Cincinnati is prone to a lot of landslides. An AP article from 2019 says that Cincinnati had the highest per-capita landslide cost in the country back in the '80s, and "experts doubt that has changed much".
Part of what contributes to this is Cincinnati's location on the Kope formation of rock underlaying the tristate area, which is composed of shale and limestone. Limestone is easily eroded by water, and shale is a sedimentary rock that deposits in thin layers. There's also a lot of lakebed clay, which expands and grows heavy when wet. With the increased precipitation in Cincinnati due to climate change--a drastic 17 percent increase in rainfall between 2000 and 2019--the soft rock underlying the hills erodes and the clay expands, damaging property and putting unsuspecting homeowners hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Earlier this year in March, Cincinnati broke its rainfall record for the first time since 1948. There will only be more extreme weather with climate change.
Cincinnati's proximity to the Ohio River does not help, with major roads and hundreds of homes on the hills by the river facing the dual threats of floods and landslides in rainy times. Urbanization has only worsened the landslides, with construction uprooting trees and reshaping the land so that the soil has become looser.
There are and have been projects to build retaining walls to prevent landslides, but these can cost up to $10 million. A good strategy is to educate people in Cincinnati about areas that are prone to landslides. I didn't even know this was such a huge issue in my hometown until researching for this project. If there was more awareness about dangerous places to buy houses and construct apartments and roads, more people could avoid these places.
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