The 14 May 2023 debris flow at Johnston Ridge Observatory Access Road, Mount Saint Helens, in Washington State, USA

On Thursday 4 May 2023, intense rainfall triggered a series of deadly mud and debris flows around Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), killing at least 401 people.

On 11 March 2023 a large debris flow occurred close to Lago Riesco in the Aysen region of southern Chile, triggered by heavy rainfall.

In a paper published in the journal Landslides, Yan et al. (2023) discuss the 30 August 2020 debris flow at Azijue village in Sichuan, China, which killed three people and destroyed two villages. The losses were caused by an unusual secondary failure of ancient deposits in the channel bed.

An open access paper in the journal Landslides (Cabral et al. 2022) analyses debris flows in Brazil over the last century, finding that 45 events have killed 5,771 people and generated US$5,5 billion in economic losses.

Yucaipa: a remarkable debris flow video from the San Bernardino Mountains in California. The flows were triggered by heavy rainfall in the El Dorado fire scar on 12 September 2022

On 10 June 2021 an extreme rainstorm triggered over 100 landslides, including a set of devastating debris flows, in the Wuxie scenic area in Zhejiang Province in China.

The Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) has written an interactive game, Murgame, that highlights the risks associated with debris flows to mountain communities

An interesting paper has just been published in the journal Science, (Cook et al. 2021), which looks at the seismic signals generated by the Chamoli rockslide and debris flow. It concludes that the event was fully detectable by seismic instruments located at up to 100 km from the event.

Two deadly landslides have occurred in Indonesia over the last few days. On the flanks of Mount Lewotolok up to 80 were killed in a lahar, whilst on Andonara island 69 people were killed and 19 are missing in a debris flow.