There are times when people are not interested in probabilities or statistics or prior events. They have a dream and they look only for opinions that validate whatever it is that they wish to obtain for themselves. We hear, year after year, of flooding in places where there is guaranteed to be overflows from natural draining systems, yet people insist on building their homes on flood plains.

Nature, in her imperious manner does what she will. Human beings seem fixated on a belief that nothing deleterious will occur as a result of challenging nature, when nothing could be further from fact.

Where communities have lived for hundreds of years in geographic areas susceptible to flooding, to hurricanes, to tsunamis, it is well known that these human-nature-cataclysmic events can occur. And they do, with regularity. Made even more certain because it is also human nature to tamper where we should not. Our puny efforts to secure a geology from an unwanted natural event often serves only to accelerate the occurrences.

In places within countries where municipal authorities must issue building permits reflective of the spaces available, taking into account the physical environment, it is generally assumed that such permits will be withheld if, for example, building will encroach on valuable wet-lands. And where landslides might occur as a result of soil type, natural drainage and ground elevation, along with land use and the history of previous landslides, prudent caution is required.

In the Province of Quebec it is generally acknowledged that Leda clay, left as an ancient memento of a huge lake that once covered the land in the primeval era, presents as a distinct problem with stability. It is not just the Province of Quebec, but parts of Ontario as well, specifically the Ottawa Valley, where types of building and areas to be avoided are a deep concern.

Huge, stone heritage buildings erected over a century ago began sinking mere decades after they were built, upon Leda clay. The Victorian-era Natural Sciences Museum in Ottawa a distinct case in point.

With that in mind it cannot be too surprising - while representing a dreadful occurrence that still, when it happens, shocks everyone back into awareness - that a house built a decade-and-a-half ago, in an area considered by the municipality to be of moderate risk for landslides, was misidentified geologically, as it truly represents a high-landslide-risk area.

Resulting in the death-by-asphyxiation of a family, when their house slide into the chasm left by a landslide.

"St. Jude is in one of the more susceptible areas in Quebec, and this could have been identified through careful prior analysis", is the opinion of a geotechnical engineer with experience in identifying geographical areas at high risk for collapse, when Leda clay becomes too sodden and suddenly critically unstable leading to landslides and open, yawning craters of dissolving Leda clay; from a solid mass into a liquefied state.

Head of the geotechnical and geological service of Transport Quebec claims the provincial government has regional maps utilized by municipal government planners to enable them to pass zoning bylaws and proceed with the administrative approval of construction permits. At the time the home built by Richard Prefontaine for his family was approved the area's risk was thought to be moderate.

But, it would appear that sage advice was completely absent in the approval process for this unfortunate family. The home was built on high ground whose sensitive type of clay was well known; nearby a river bend. And, to the alert and questioning eye, fresh cracks in the road might have led one to surmise that there had been recent soil movement.

"That river bend was eating into the bank", said Noel Journeaux, a Pointe Claire-based geotechnical engineer, "It was not a good place to put a house."