19 October 2010
Two fatal landslides in the earthquake affected areas of Haiti
Posted by Dave Petley
Problems continue in the earthquake affected areas of Haiti, where over 2 million people remain essentially homeless 10 months after the devastating earthquake. Reporters Live are carrying a story that heavy rainfall in the last 48 hours has triggered two, rather different fatality-inducing landslides:
1. A collapse in a sand quarry
Illegal quarrying of sand to be used for rebuilding is turning into a major, if unsurprising, problem in the hills around Port-au-Prince. The reports suggest that such a quarry to the west of Port-au-Prince collapsed in the heavy rainfall, killing eight people including two children.
2. Landslide in Carrefour
Meanwhile the article also notes that a second landslide, this time in Carrefour, killed four people and left a further three missing. The report also suggests that “residents likewise said that there had been unreported mudslides that occurred in the last few weeks”.
So far this year, Haiti has not been hit by a major hurricane, although we are not quite out of the woods yet. Unfortunately, the extreme vulnerability to heavy rainfall of both the landscape and the population is going to be a long lasting legacy of the earthquake.
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.
First of all, I would like to tell you how much I love your blog. I am a geological engineering student and frequent it regularly. Second, I was speaking with my Geology Professor, Ms. Boyd, yesterday about this blog post and we were distracted and enraptured by the photo at the top of your page. Can you please tell us where this was taken? Ms. Boyd believes it to be from the Andes near Italy. Thank you for your assistance and for continuing to feed my obsession with landslides.
The picture was taken in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan a few weeks after the Kashmir earthquake in 2005. The grey rocks are limestones in which multiple seismically-induced landslides occurred – these are the slides that you can see in the image. The red rocks are sandstones and shales. The junction between them is essentially the thrust fault that was responsble for the earthquake. Note the difference in landslide density on the two sides of the fault. The limestones are on the hanging wall side, which typically has a much higher density than the footwall side, as is the case here.Dave
Thank you so much Dr Dave for your prompt attention. 🙂