Mrs. Meyers’ students have been working on an engineering experiment to determine whether there are ways to prevent a mudslide, such as the one that occurred near Oso on March 22, 2014. They designed and conducted their experiments and this week they are presenting their findings to their peers.
Some of the students have decided to install cement walls
and others have experimented with placing a net over the hillside to prevent
erosion. Each group tested their
hypothesis with a small scale model and recorded their results. In many cases, the result was that they could
slow down the erosion, but not prevent the soil from coming down the hillside.
The students fielded questions from others who were asking
about the real world application from different perspectives, such as a logger,
environmentalist, home owner, first responder, and city/county official. The questions were genuine and thought
provoking. The home owners wanted to
know if they would survive if they lived on the other side of a proposed wall,
environmentalists were concerned about the animals getting caught in the netting
and the loggers weren’t sure they were going to be able to get their equipment
up the hill so that they could access the trees.
