25 April 2010

The location of the Taiwan highway landslide

Posted by Dave Petley

I have I think identified the location of the Taiwan highway landslide today.  Based upon this image (source):

The location appears to be here:

It appears that the failure has occurred on the cutslope shown in the centre of the image, with the margin of the slide being close to the bridge (which can be seen in the first image on top of the debris).  Thus, it appears to be a large cut slope failure.

This is certainly not the first time a cut slope has failed on a major highway, as these two examples show.  First, the Pigeon Gorge slide in North Carolina last year:

And second the 2003 Bukit Lanjan landslide in Malaysia:

However this slide in Taiwan is unusually large, with an interesting mechanism.