9 January 2013
An interesting Austrian earthflow video
Posted by Dave Petley
In the last few days there has been a number of landslides in Austria caused by heavy rainfall. The BBC has a short video report that includes a nice piece of footage of a large earthflow inundating a road:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa4vc2feXBQ
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This apparently happened near to Salzburg. Earthflows are rarely caught on video, so this is a good addition to the collection of available footage. An interesting aspect of this is the increased rate of movement of the frontal portion as it started to runout. This may indicate that the material weakened as it remoulded during movement or that the road provided a low friction surface to run across, perhaps?
Dave Petley is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His blog provides commentary and analysis of landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings.
the landslide took place not far away from my place (15km).
some additional picutures of the landslide (http://www.fmt-pictures.eu/berichte/thumbnails.php?album=1965 ) and the cleaning-up operation can be viewed here (http://www.fmt-pictures.eu/berichte/thumbnails.php?album=1976), there´s also a video available and as you can see, most of the landslide was cleaned in the lasst days, especially the trees (videolink: http://tinyurl.com/a7nwf2q)
have you heard of the very slow debris flow in Alta Badia (Italy)? (http://tinyurl.com/af55ult)