This morning’s Mw=6.9 earthquake in China is now reported to have killed at least 300 people, with the toll likely to rise over the next few hours.  Although the earthquake occurred in an area with a low population total and density, vulnerability of both buildings and the landscape to shaking is likely to be high, especially given the reported shallow nature (depth = 10 km) of the event. The Google …

AFP is reporting that an earthquake struck Guanling, Zhenfeng and Zhenning districts in Guizhou province at 09:35 UT yesterday (Sunday), triggering two landslides that have killed seven people and left one person missing. Other news agencies are reporting that one of the landslides struck a boat on a river. The peculiar thing about this is that the earthquake appears to have been very small indeed. The USGS does not have …

The Xian Center of Geological Survey is compiling a set of very useful web resources of case studies of large landslides in Central China. This is particularly interesting as many of the slides are loess failures, which are comparatively poorly documented. The home page is here:http://www.xian.cgs.gov.cn/english/achievements/land/ There are two items of particular interest there. The first is a PDF of a presentation on the landslides triggered by the Wenchuan earthquake. …

Back in August I posted a couple of times on a fatal landslide in at Lifan (sometimes written Loufan) in Sigou County in Shanxi Province in China (the posts are here and here), which appeared to be a mining related flowslide that killed 45 people. Yesterday the People’s Daily website ran a story explaining the results of the enquiry into the landslide: “Illegal production and slack safety oversight were main …

See update here The Chinese language version of the Xinhua website is reporting that a landslide occurred this morning in Zhangzishan Township, Zhongyang County, Luliang in Shanxi province, burying five houses. Reports suggest that about 25 people were buried – of these two have been rescued alive whilst 12 bodies have been recovered so far. Xinhua has images of the scene: You may well have noticed the slightly odd aspect …

As soon as I had posted the round-up of catastrophic landslides below another one appeared on the newswires, this time in Mainland China. Xinhua is reporting that Typhoon Marakot has triggered a landslide in Pengxi Township, Taishun County in Zhejiang Province, burying half a dozen apartment blocks: “A massive landslide occurred in an eastern Chinese town Monday night, causing six or seven apartment buildings to collapse and burying an unknown …

The Chinese language website www.scol.com.cn has some images of the area upstream of the landslide dam at Dadu here. This also links to what appears to be a Chinese language bulletin board here in which people are posting images of the situation. If this is as it seems then this area has serious problems. although reports do seem to indicate that the river is not completely blocked. For example, this …

The web site China.org.cn is reporting a major valley blocking landslide on the Dadu River in Sichuan: “A massive landslide in southwest China’s Sichuan Province has killed at least one person and injured 19 others, local officials said Friday morning. The landslide, which occurred at around 11:30 p.m. Thursday in Shunhe Township of Hanyuan County, also blocked a major local river, leaving six local residents stranded, said officials from the …

The landslide misery in China continues, despite the strange lack of typhoons to date this summer. The latest incident occurred in Liuzhou City of Guangxi Province when a train struck a landslide and derailed. According to Xinhua four people were killed and 50 others were injured, at least ten of whom were seriously hurt. Xinhua has published a photograph of the aftermath of the incident: Thus it appears that the …

In the past week China has suffered two rather extraordinary landslide accidents at hydroelectric plants. The first occurred an 20th July 2009 near to the Xiaowan hydroelectric power station in Yunnan province. The dam, shown in the artist’s impression below, will apparently be the world’s tallest arched dam, standing 292 m high when finished. It is still under construction, with the first turbine expected to be operational later this year: …