3 August 2010 08:31 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
The true magnitude of the disaster in Pakistan is now becoming clear – this appears to be the country’s equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. It has to be hoped that lessons are learnt both within the country and by the international community in terms of disaster risk reduction there. In 2007 the World Health Organisation produced a flood potential map for Pakistan, which I reproduce below: The flood wave is travelling …
Tags: flash flood, hurricane, monsoon, pakistan, typhoon
2 August 2010 08:42 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
The floods in Pakistan appear to be starting to generate substantial interest in the UK, although this may in part be a result of the perhaps surprising decision of the Pakistan president to travel to London today. Whilst the crisis continues to develop in the north of the country, of equal concern now must be the progression of the flood wave down the Indus River. Of course Pakistan is a …
Tags: flood, pakistan
1 August 2010 20:30 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
In the UK the current floods in Pakistan are failing to gather the level of coverage that they deserve, although there has at least been some interest. The death toll is currently standing at over 1,100 people, with a million or more directly affected. Fortunately, the Attabad Dam appears to have avoided the worst of the rainfall, so far at least, and has remained intact, although the water level has …
Tags: flash flood, landslide report, pakistan
12 May 2010 08:22 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
NASA have released a new ASTER image of the lake that continues to build behind the landslide at Attabad in Hunza, N. Pakistan. Included in this image is the outline of the lake as it was in their image in March, showing the increase in surface area: A couple of things to note on this image:1. The red areas indicate vegetation. Given that this area is very close to being …
Tags: Attabad, barrier lake, Hunza, pakistan
6 May 2010 07:08 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
The rate of inflow at the Attabad landslide has now started to increase appreciably as warming and snowmelt really get underway. The graph below shows the daily rate of water increase, using data from the Focus measurements (the daily data are available on my monitoring website): The rate of increase for the last two days with data has been 89 cm per day. At that rate the water will overtop …
Tags: Attabad, Hunza, landslide dam, pakistan
16 April 2010 11:45 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
I have today updated my monitoring site for the Hunza (Attabad) landslide. However, there are a number of key developments that are worth noting: 1. The rate of seepage has started to increase once againThe graph of seepage against time shows that seepage is increasing rapidly at the moment, albeit at rates that are still only a fraction of the inflow rate: The key factor here is the development of …
Tags: Hunza, landslide dam, landslide report, pakistan
10 March 2010 11:13 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
Yesterday a meeting was held by the Ministry of the Environment in Islamabad to discuss the Attabad landslide, based at least in part on my report from my recent field visit on behalf of Focus. I am glad to say that the upshot of that meeting is that the authorities are now preparing an evacuation plan for a potential breach of the lake, according to this report: “As over 15,000 …
Tags: Hunza, landslide dam, pakistan
5 March 2010 08:08 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
I am now back from my comparatively short but very interesting trip to the Attabad landslide in N. Pakistan. I will make a series of posts about this serious but very interesting landslide over the next few days. As a taster, here a few images of the site. The first image was taken from the top of the 1858 Salmanabad landslide deposit, looking upstream to the Attabad slide. The scar …
Tags: Hunza, landslide dam, landslide images, pakistan, Pakistan landslide dam
9 February 2010 21:09 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
The largest landslide in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake occurred at Hattian, 25 km or so from Muzaffarabad: My colleagues and I wrote a paper on this landslide a few years ago (you can download the pdf here). It was notable for the fact that it blocked the valley – in the aftermath the Pakistan Army built a spillway to ensure that uncontrolled overtopping did not occur. The landslide has been …
Tags: Kashmir, landslide report, Pakistan landslide dam
31 January 2010 20:44 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
The latest news from the site of the Attabad landslide in Hunza, Pakistan, as relayed by the Pamir Times, is somewhat mixed. There is now a very helpful video of the landslide site on Youtube, which gives a proper view of the slide and its deposit from the scarp area: The scarp area appears to be highly fractured and unstable. Meanwhile, this report states that the lake continues to rise …
Tags: Attabad, barrier lake, landslide report, pakistan
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