10 September 2010
Italian debris flood video
Posted by Dave Petley
Thanks to Ivan Montanari for highlighting this one. Youtube has an extraordinary video of a debris flood that appears to have occurred yesterday at Atrani on the Amalfi Coast in Italy:
The video makes a slowish start, so keep watching. This is the first debris flow of cars that I have seen on video…! This is a Google Earth perspective image of Atrani:
I guess it is not hard to see how very heavy rainfall, or another hydrological event in the catchment, can lead to such an event.
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.
Impressive video! This also remainds me of what happened in Madeira island (I'm from Portugal)on February 20th this year. You can search on youtube by "inundações madeira" and some videos with impressive images will show.
Wow! Such a powerful flow! This is a great example of how geologic processes can overrun and bury areas and wildlife. Fossil bed discoveries that describe large numbers of plants and animals being quickly buried could owe their existence to events like this. I hope there is an engineering solution for this town and other like it along the coast that can be implemented.
Here are some pictures of the day after situation. One girl is unfortunately unaccounted forhttp://napoli.repubblica.it/cronaca/2010/09/10/foto/alluvione-6948962/1/
This link is from a fall '09 storm in the area near ManilaLink; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHTYKwI7qZg
Youtube tip: Specify the start time to skip the boring part at the beginning, link like this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Kb7sq12mo#t=1m30s
[…] such that there are severe weather warnings for a large area. Italy is of course very prone to floods, mudslides and large landslides, as covered in previous posts […]