Updated: correct landslide location – thanks to various readers (especially Andrew Giles and Steve in ATL) for helping me to get this right – and apologies for the earlier error. I have posted an update to this post here. Various media agencies (e.g. here, here and here) are reporting a large landslide at Naches in Yakima County, Washington State, USA, which has blocked state highway. The Seattle Times has a …

As commenters on my earlier threads have pointed out (thanks to them), the location of the landslide in Guatemala can now be pinpointed using a map produced by CONRED. This map comes from a very useful report, with some good images of the rescue and recovery operation, available here. I have reproduced the map below (click on the map for a better view): Helpfully, this allows the location to be …

EPA/MIKE NELSON image showing the displaced blocks at El Doweiqa The death toll in the rock slide at El Doweiqa in the Manshiet Nasser slum of east Cairo is slowly creeping upwards. At the time of writing it has exceeded 30 people, but unfortunately as the image below shows the likelihood is that it will be much higher once these huge blocks have been shifted (if ever). As an aside, …

The newswires are providing early reports of a terrible rockslide at Deweka (also reported as Bekheit and Manshiyet Nasron) on the outskirts of Cairo in Egypt. The slide appears to be a rather strange failure of a rock slope, releasing huge boulders that have buried several (and possibly many) buildings. This Al Jazeera post contains a very useful report and also has this image of the site: They are reporting …

Hat tip to Scott McDougall, Erik Eberhardt and Andrew Giles, all from Canada, for this one. Many readers will be familiar with the classic book “Rock Slope Engineering” by Evert Hoek, which still represents the bible for understanding the mechanisms of failure of hard rock slopes. The cover of the original version featured a photograph of a 1965 rock slope failure on the so-called “Sea to Sky” highway in British …

I am not normally a fan of Chicken Noodle News (CNN), but they have an interesting report detailing the damage in Beichuan resulting from the impact of the rockslide. It is worth a view. I cannot find a way to link to the original report, but there is a good quality version of it here. AP image captioned: Rescue workers search collapsed buildings in Beichuan, China’s southwest Sichuan province, Sunday …

A loyal reader has collated available Lidar data for the Brienz-Brinzauls landslide site, and has created an amazing video.

The 27 December 1898 Sasso Rosso landslide in Switzerland, which killed three people and destroyed 11 houses.

A new paper (Rosi et al. 2023) in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences presents a landslide susceptibility map for Central Asia.

The rockslope at Brienz/Brinzauls in Switzerland is accelerating, although forecasting future behaviour remains difficult.