Indonesia is today trying to deal simultaneously with two substantial natural hazards of a rather different nature.  The earthquake on Monday 25th October triggered a localised tsunami in the Mentawai islands, close to the epicentre, the Reuters Alertnet reports killed 108 people and has left a further 502 people missing.  The data on the earthquake available on the USGS website suggest that this was a Mw=7.7 event at a depth of …

Alongside the continuing Attabad crisis, here is a summary of the last week in landslide events (in no particular order).  The list is not exhaustive by any account, but these are the stories that caught my eye: 1.The Oliver debris flow in CanadaI covered this event in a post or two earlier in the week.  It is now clear that the trigger was the overtopping and eventual failure (through a …

The reinsurance giant Munich Re releases annual statistics on the losses from natural catastrophes each year. They released the data for 2009 yesterday, presumably banking on the balance of probabilities that there would be no more major events in the three days left of the year. The release is available here: http://www.munichre.com/en/press/press_releases/2009/2009_12_29_press_release.aspxOverall resultsThe news for 2009 is good, with no disasters causing mass (i.e. >10,000) fatalities. There list of the …

The reinsurance giant Munich Re releases annual statistics on the losses from natural catastrophes each year. They released the data for 2009 yesterday, presumably banking on the balance of probabilities that there would be no more major events in the three days left of the year. The release is available here: http://www.munichre.com/en/press/press_releases/2009/2009_12_29_press_release.aspxOverall resultsThe news for 2009 is good, with no disasters causing mass (i.e. >10,000) fatalities. There list of the …

Thanks to Dr Kurt Douglas at the University of New South Wales for drawing my attention to this. The Australian Courier Mail has a story today about a family that survived a near miss from a 1500 tonne boulder that rolled from the hill above their house in southern Queensland on Friday. The rock detached from the slope above their house and rolled to within 50 m of their property …

Willis is a large insurance and reinsurance broker based in London. A key part of their primary business lies in arranging insurance for catastrophe risk – i.e. losses from mega-events such as an earthquake in Tokyo or San Francisco, a storm surge flood in London or a volcanic eruption near to Mexico City. Calculating the risks associated with these events is a challenging task, but of course the stakes are …

Willis is a large insurance and reinsurance broker based in London. A key part of their primary business lies in arranging insurance for catastrophe risk – i.e. losses from mega-events such as an earthquake in Tokyo or San Francisco, a storm surge flood in London or a volcanic eruption near to Mexico City. Calculating the risks associated with these events is a challenging task, but of course the stakes are …

I thought that it was time to provide a round-up of some landslide events from around the world: 1. A narrow escape in AustraliaThanks to Remke van Dam for bringing this one to my attention. This Australian family had a pretty lucky escape last week when a pair of large rocks struck their car (image from here): 2. A road-blocking rockfall in AlaskaThanks to John Fritz for this one. In …

I thought that it was high time to post a summary of some interesting landslide sites: Aowanda landslideThere is an interesting youtube video of a smallish progressive rockslide occurring at Aowanda in Taiwan here. It should also be visible below: Not quite as dramatic as some others, but useful nonetheless. Five disastrous landslides that changed the Canadian LandscapeThere is quite a nice non-scientific piece here that describes in non-technical language …

In the last few days there have been two landslides that have led to searches in the hope of finding buried victims. The higher profile slide was this one that occurred in the Bukit Antarabangsa suburb of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) on Saturday (pictures from The Star): This landslide, which has dominated the news in Malaysia over the last few days, killed four people and injured a further 15. One person …