31 July 2013

The Darjeeling landslide disaster of 1950

Posted by Dave Petley

The excellent Save the Hills blog has a really interesting presentation online by Praful Rao about the landslide disaster in June1950 in Darjeeling, Northern IndiaThe presentation is available on Authorstream and I have embedded it below:

[authorSTREAM id= 1893115_635107421450720000 pl= player by= Nubiagroup]
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This Darjeeling landslide disaster appears to have been triggered by a strong rainfall event on 12th June 1950, in which 546 mm of rainfall fell.  As a result, 127 people are known to have died in the landslides.

Included in the presentation are some quite wonderful photographs of the landslides, taken by Durga Das Pradhan, the majority of which appear to have been shallow failures such as this:

13_07 darjeeling 1

Photo by Mr Durga Das Pradhan

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However, there is one case of a shallow slide that appears to have become a channelised debris flow:

Photo by Mr Durga Das Pradhan

Photo by Mr Durga Das Pradhan

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And one landslide that has a rather complex morphology (take a look at the railway line):

Photo by Mr Durga Das Pradhan

Photo by Mr Durga Das Pradhan

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