10 August 2010
Update: Dramatic increase in the loss of life in the Gansu landslide
Posted by Dave Petley
Xinhua has this morning dramatically increased estimated loss of life in the landslide at Zhouqu in Gansu Province, China. The latest toll is 702 known fatalities and a further 1,042 people missing.
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.
Thank you very much for these postings, they are very helpful and informative. As an update to your blog post, today's Xinhua news cites the death toll as 1,117 fatalities with 627 still missing (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-08/11/c_13440469.htm)
Dear Dave:I wish that you and others in the media would quit saying that the "one child policy" is exacerbating the pain of people in China. Children are not fungible. We don't have two, for example, so we have "back up". Losing any child is horrific. You would not tell someone who had two children and lost one, "hey, thank goodness you had two!". Would you? Please cut it out.Otherwise, love the blog and follow it closely. You are wonderfully thorough and I have learned a lot from it.
Before and after aerial photos of Gansu showing the two slide routes at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10925531Kitharbinger – For those couples with one child killed in the slide it might be too late to have another. A child is your pension policy in China – harsh but true – and so the loss is inevitably going to affect a family far more greatly and for a far longer time.
Another aerial photo at http://spacegizmo.livingdazed.com/2010/08/10/zhugqu-china-mudslide/