Better late than never (just a tad busy at the moment…), here is the fatal landslide map for August 2008. First the statistics:Number of recorded fatal landslides: 61Number of recorded fatalities: 537 As such August was substantially above the average for the last five years (212 fatalities). This is interesting as regular readers will know that until the end of July most months have been substantially below the five year …

It is unusual to have two major stories running simultaneously about landslides so here is a combined update: 1. The Manshiet Nasser landslide in Cairo The death toll in the Cairo landslide disaster continues to rise – it is now officially 69 people. There seems to be considerable confusion about how many people are left trapped – but is fair to say that there is now no hope of rescuing …

I am currently putting together a keynote paper for the forthcoming International Conference on Slopes, which is being held in Malaysia in November. I have been looking at the occurrence of fatal landslides in Asia, using the Durham Landslide Database as the source of data. I have plotted the number of fatal landslides by month for 2002-2007 for three areas – South Asia (i.e. the Indian subcontinent), East Asia (which …

This week I am giving three presentations in New Zealand – first in Christchurch today, then Wellington tomorrow and Auckland on Thursday. The title of the presentation is Earthquake Induced Landslides – Lessons from Taiwan and Pakistan. The talk is to the various branches of the New Zealand Geotechnical Society and the New Zealand Society of Earthquake Engineering. I have uploaded the presentation to authorstream so that it can be …

I thought it might be interesting to compare the occurrence of fatal landslides in July 2007 in relation to the distribution of rainfall in that month. Let’s start off by looking at the July 2007 fatal landslide map (you will probably need to click on the map to get a decent view of it). As a comparison, below are the statistics for July 2007 and July 2008, followed by the …

The map below shows the provisional distribution of fatal landslides for June 2008. The (again provisional) statistics are:Number of fatal landslides: 55Number of fatalities: 2127 Once again, the number of recorded fatalities this month has been substantially below the average for 2002-2007, which is 504 deaths. This is consistent with the monthly totals for the whole of the year – indeed at the moment 2008 has the lowest number of …

As I sit in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, enduring an interminable wait for a flight to Newcastle, I have started to reflect upon the International Symposium on Landslides and Engineered Slopes, and upon the state of landslide science in general. First, the conference conveners should be congratulated for a well-organised meeting. The venue (the Shaanxi Guest House in Xian) was quite good, although I was quite glad that we chose …

The map below shows the distribution of fatal landslides for June 2008. The statistics are:Number of fatal landslides: 43Number of fatalities: 215 As has been the pattern all year, June was substantially below the average number of fatalities for may in 2003-2007, which is 334 deaths. Interestingly, during June there have been extensive reports of intense and prolonged rainfall events, but this does not seem to have translated into fatal …

This week is the 10th International Symposium on Landslides and Engineered Slopes, which is a once every four years get together. This time round it is being held in Xi’an in China, which is particularly appropriate given the recent events a few hundred kilometres to the southwest. The organisers managed to timetable a session of two keynotes and six other presentations on landslides associated withe the earthquake. The session was …

One of the most admirable science projects at NASA at the current time is an attempt to create a global landslide and flood warning system using the Tropical Rainfall Monitoring Mission satellite data. TRMM using a precipitation radar system to provide near real time data on the intensity of rainfall in the tropical and subtropical regions. NASA then make these data available on the TRMM website. The usefulness of these …