8 February 2017
Further movement of the Eaglepointe landslide in Utah
Posted by Dave Petley
Further movement of the Eaglepointe landslide in Utah
Over the last few days further movement has been recorded on the Eaglepointe landslide in North Salt Lake, Utah. This is the second period of reactivation this year. KSL notes the following:
North Salt Lake city leaders and homeowners are once again concerned a landslide after a portion of a hillside shifted late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. “You see it. You see the slough, you see the fall off, and it’s just scary,” North Salt Lake resident Terry Rasch said. He lives a few houses up and couldn’t believe it when he woke up Tuesday and saw his neighbor shoveling mud, and then he noticed why. A large chuck of land slid down a few feet, closer and closer to his neighbor’s home. City workers put hay bales and sandbags into place to try to keep any more movement and mud from flowing into the house below. This is the same area where a home at 739 Parkway Drive was destroyed in a substantial slide on Aug. 5, 2014.
This is the landslide about which I posted about back in 2014. KSL also has a nice gallery of images of the landslide, including this one:
The Eaglepointe landslide via KSL
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Google Earth has a nice sequence of images showing the development of this landslide in recent years. This is an image from 2013:-
The Eaglepointe landslide in 2013 via Google Earth
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2015:
The Eaglepointe landslide in 2015 via Google Earth
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And 2016:
The Eaglepointe landslide in 2016 via Google Earth
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There is also a good repository of reports into the site, including assessments of the location prior to the first failure, on a webpage hosted by the City of North Salt Lake. It appears from the news reports that further movement is expected at this site in response to precipitation events.
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.
The Utah Geological Survey refers to this slide as the Parkway Drive Landslide. Here’s their summary and recent GPS survey http://geology.utah.gov/hazards/landslides-rockfalls/parkway_drive_landslide/
All data, including photos, video, correspondences, geotechnical reports, etc, collected by the state is available here:
https://geodata.geology.utah.gov/pages/search.php?search=%21collection108&order_by=field86&sort=ASC&offset=0&archive=0&sort=ASC&restypes=&display=thumbs&k=
So, comparing photos of 2013 and 2015&2016, it seems to me that after the landslide took one of the McMansions with it (or maybe it was demolished before that), somebody built a similar house right next to the old plot?
Yes, there was one home destroyed during the 2014 slide, the occupants were alerted and all evacuated safely. To get a sense of the slide, here’s a point cloud comparison from lidar, flown before the slide, and structure from motion pointcloud acquired a few months after. https://skfb.ly/GVBW Red is negative vertical change, up to 20 meters; blue is positive, up to 15 meters.
Sure…I leave my birth state and it starts to fall apart.