Updated: two new images of the site at the end of the post

An extraordinary landslide occurred this morning in Hanyuan County, Sichuan Province, leaving 21 people missing and 58 houses damaged or destroyed.  English People’s Daily and Xinhua have some images of the landslide:

The slide, which occurred at 5 am this morning, is estimated to have had a volume of 100,000 cubic metres (although I suspect that it may be larger than this).  It came from Ermanshan Mountain and struck Shuanghe Village at the toe.  The level of destruction looks to be very serious.  Given the time of the landslide (when most people will be at home and asleep, and it would have been dark or just starting to get light), a fatality count of 21 persons would be surprisingly low in my view.


The location of Hanyuan County in the Geonames Search Engine is shown in the Google Earth image below:

Updated: this Chinese language website has some more images: