A nasty landslide this week in Peru triggered some thoughts about the occurrence of landslides that kill the passngers on buses. The event that triggered these thoughts occurred on 6th February when heavy rain dislodged a boulder hit a bus and knocked it into the Tarma River in Junin Province in Peru. Seven people were killed and a further 23 were injured.

TV3 news in New Zealand had this picture of the remains of the vehicle:

Such events appear on the database quite often, so I thought it might be interesting just to look at the 2007 data to see where and when they occur. These are the bus-related landslides within the Durham database:

It is clear that there is a particular problem with landslides affecting buses in mountain areas, particularly in Asia. Over 200 deaths is a very high impact indeed. The impacts occur in one of three main ways:
1. Buses being hit by landslides or by rockfalls and knocked into a river (as in the case of Peru this week)
2. Buses being buried by landslide debris (this happened in the Pakistan example)
3. Buses being affected by a human induced failure. The Badong event in China was the result of a rockfall triggered by tunnel construction.

There are occasional other factors too – in one case the accident occurred because the driver was speeding to attempt to avoid a rockfall. I suspect that no-one has ever undertaken a systematic study of bus-related landslide fatalities. This is probably an important topic.