You probably guessed that I am on holiday this week (normal service will be resumed at the weekend), but I thought I’d quickly post this new debris flow video from Hunza in Pakistan. The interesting but starts at about 1 minute 15 seconds:

Thanks to several people for the heads up on this.  Various Indian news agencies are reporting that the town of Leh in Ladakh, Indian controlled Kashmir was hit by a series of debris flows / flas floods triggered by a cloudburst.  The reported death toll is currently reported to be at least 50, and may increase substantially. This Panoramio image gives a fairly good idea of what Leh is like:

Thanks to a number of people for bringing this one to my attention.  The community of Oliver in British Columbia yesterday suffered an impressive mud and debris flow that is reported to have destroyed five homes (images from the Vancouver Sun): The flow has clearly come out of a deeply incised gully in the mountains: A perspective view of the excellent Google Earth imagery of this area is rather helpful: …

In addition to visiting the Shiaolin landslide in Taiwan at the weekend, we also managed to visit a couple of other places that had suffered damage during typhoon Morakot. Damage from debris flows and river floods occurred extensively throughout the upland areas of southern Taiwan, as these images show: The government has set aside about US$5 billion for reconstruction. Unfortunately this area is threatened by another typhoon, called Parma:

Thanks to Lynn Highland at the USGS for drawing my attention to this video of a debris flow in Costa Rica: This is a slightly strange event. It occurred on the Sarapiqui River in Costa Rica after the 16th January 2009 Cinchona earthquake. It is not all clear why the earthquake should have triggered such a debris flow given that there was no rainfall, but a suggestion is that there …

One question that I am quite often asked is why it is that fatalities in landslides occur more at night than in the day. In some ways this is counter-intuitive as one might expect that people would be safer in their houses than they are when they are out and about. At least a part of the answer lies I think in the destructive potential of comparatively slow landslides. Most …

Thanks to a former student for bringing the following video to my attention. Hopefully it will play directly when you click on the box below – if not then take a look at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2uTKyK1c9k This channelised debris flow occurred on Lantau Island, near to Hong Kong airport, on 7th June when the area was affected by an exceptional (“black”) rainfall event. In a single hour Hong Kong observatory recorded 140 mm …

The Las Tejerías landslide disaster: Planet Labs imagery of the source of the flows shows multiple shallow slips

The 27 July 2022 Imamzadeh Dawood mudflow disaster in the mountains near Tehran is one of a number of recent landslides in Iran.

Last week, heavy rainfall triggered mudflows, captured on video, from the scar of the Pipeline Fire in Arizona