26 September 2010

Images of yesterday’s landslide-induced train incidents

Posted by Dave Petley

First, an apology in advance.  I am just en route to Chengdu in China, where I will stay until Saturday.  Whilst this provides an opportunity to return to Beichuan, which will be very interesting in the context of the rainfall-induced landslides this summer, it presents some other challenges.  The most serious of these is that Blogger is blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so I will not be able to access it to make posts.  So if it all goes quiet for the next few days, please accept my apologies.  I should be able to post again on Saturday.

Anyway, in the meantime thanks to various people for highlighting photos of the various landslide-related train incidents over the last 48 hours.  It now appears that New Zealand on its own experienced two incidents; in addition to the one at Manawatu Gorge there was also an incident at Taumaranui.  There were no injuries in either case.

In terms of the Manawatu Gorge incident, stuff.co.nz has a pretty spectacular set of images:

Meanwhile, there are also some images of the incident in India available on The Hindu website here.  Unfortunately, at the time of writing their site is down, but I managed to access it last night. Hopefully you will have more luck!