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25 August 2008
Presentation from New Zealand
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 …
23 August 2008
Shotover rockfall in New Zealand
Reports today suggest that an interesting landslide problem in New Zealand has finally come to a close. The location of the problem was the Shotover River in Otago, which is a little to the north of Queenstown on South Island. Shotover is famous as an extreme sports location – in particular jet-boating on the Shotover River, white water rafting and a canyon swing (a sort of bungee jump I think) …
15 August 2008
The relationship between global fatal landslides and rainfall in July
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 …
12 August 2008
July 2008 fatal landslide map
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 …
7 August 2008
A follow up to the Sea to Sky Highway landslide
Back on 1st August I posted about a landslide that had blocked the Sea to Sky Highway (Canadian Highway 99), which links Vancouver to Whistler, venue of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. The road was blocked for a few days, but has now reopened. Two sets of colleagues in Canada have very kindly provided follow ups to that post. First, Frank Baumann, who is a geotechnical engineer in Squamish has …
Mount Adams rock and snow avalanche
The online site Oregon Environmental News has today carried a rather nice article on a new, large, rock and snow avalanche on Mount Adams (Fig. 1) in the Cascade Range in Washington State. Mount Adams is a stratovolcano that has a long history of such events. Many readers will be aware for example of the 31st August 1997 event, which had a volume of about 5 million cubic metres, and …
3 August 2008
Updated (corrected re confusion between naina Devi and Nainital): The Naina Devi temple stampede in India
News reports today report a tragedy in Himachal Pradesh when a stampede at a Hindu temple at Naina Devi led to at least 147 people, most of them women and children being crushed to death. A further 37 people were injured. Initial, unconfirmed, reports suggest that the trigger for the stampede was a rumour of a landslide. Thus, for example, MyNews.in reported that: “Additional District Magistrate C P Verma said …
1 August 2008
Rockslide on the Sea to Sky Highway in British Columbia
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 …
30 July 2008
Some landslide images from the Alps
Well, I am finally back – apologies for the prolonged absence! It will take me a day or two to get back up to speed, but in the meantime I thought I’d post four landslide images from Switzerland and France that I took whilst on holiday (I have a very long suffering family…). In each case you can click on the image for a better view. Please feel free to …
8 July 2008
Rockfalls from the Eiger
In 2006 Hans Rudolf Keusen of Geotest raised concerns that a large pillar on the Eiger mountain in Switzerland had become unstable. Over the next few weeks the pillar did indeed progressively fail, providing some amazing images of a large rockfall in action (Fig 1): Figure 1: AP image entitled: On July 13, 2006, masses of rock fell down from Eiger, near Grindelwald. The event came after days of warnings …
Dave Petley is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His blog provides commentary and analysis of landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings.
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