10 January 2010
Riverbank collapses on the Murray River in Australia
Posted by Dave Petley
As I am currently in Sydney en route to New Zealand it seemed appropriate to post an Australian story. Australia rarely appears on the fatal landslide database, but it currently has a profound slope failure issue of its own, which is sufficiently serious to merit a campaign by a newspaper.
The issue is related to the Murray River in the southeast of the country:
The problem is that the Murray River is currently suffering river bank collapses along a 270 km stretch. The land adjacent to the banks is cracking, some collapses have already occurred, and the situation is getting progressively worse.
Image of an ongoing riverbank failure on the Murray (from here)The problem is being blamed on the current drought in south Australia. As a result the flow level in the Murray River is at historically low levels. It is not immediately clear to me whether this means that the riverbanks have been debutressed by the reduced flow, or are cracking due to being exceptionally dry, or have lost the stabilising affect of vegetation due to the drought, or a combination of all three (or even some other factor), but the situation is clearly critical.
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 picture in your blog of the gentleman next to the collapse is at the marina where we keep our boat, so I'm rather familiar with the collapses. You can say the cause is a "combination" of all three, plus a couple. As for the reason for the depletion of the Lower Murray River, well, that's more contentious. It is partially the drought, but it's also overallocation of irragation water upstream, where what flows have entered the river are being held behind locks, dams and in reservoirs for future irragation purposes. To add insult to injury, they are currently building a new pipeline to Melbourne that will challenge available environmental flows even further.
[…] readers may remember that a year or so ago I posted a short piece on an ongoing problem in South Australia associated with riverbank failure on the lower part of the […]