On the Via Ferrata, about 12 to 15 pupils, with their teachers and guides, were on the rock face when boulders tumbled down from the broken peaks of Mount Kinabalu. Amal Ashley Lim, 12, was one of the students who had just started on the Via Ferrata. Linked by a rope to schoolmates El Wafeeq El Jauzy, Navdeep Singh Jaryal Raj Kumar and Sonia Jhala, they were led by teacher Madam Nur Uzaimah Fadzali. Behind them were Daanish Amran, the Singaporean guide, and a Mountain Torq trainer. \u201cRocks were falling. I almost fell but luckily I grabbed on to my teacher\u2019s legs,\u201d Amal Ashley told The New Paper. She was lucky enough not to be hurt by the falling rocks, which were half the size of car tyres. \u201cThey hit my backpack,\u201d she said. Her teacher, Madam Uzaimah, had pulled her under a rock overhang, but went out again to find help.\u00a0 Another pupil, Emyr Uzayr, was saved by teacher Mohamed Faizal Abdul Salam. Mr Faizal cut the rope that bound him and the pupils, before cutting the ropes of Emyr\u2019s harness. He used his body to shield him and two other pupils.<\/p>\n
Mountain Torq trainer Hillary Augustinus, 34, was on the Walk the Torq with one group of students when he saw the rocks tumbling down. \u201cWhen I look up, I can see a wave of rocks falling towards us, small, big boulders, with heavy clouds of dust. The rock face is shaking, we just lean there (on the rock),\u201d he said.He slipped down the slope for a heart-stopping moment, but was held up by his backup safety rope; and through the rocks and dust, he saw a small crack to his right.\u201cOut of instinct, I just crawl… to the crack. All I could do was to put my life in God\u2019s hands,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s helpless, very helpless, you just couldn\u2019t do anything.\u201dWhen the quake stopped, his hands were bloodied and his right knee was hit by a rock. But he knew he had to move before more rocks fell, so he undid his rope and climbed up.A number of pupils were still clinging on to the rock face, frozen in shock.\u201cI respect them, they were very strong, they were not crying,\u201d he said.\u201cWe try to rescue as many as we can, one after another, and send them to the summit trail.\u201dDespite the best efforts of the teachers and trainers, they could not save everyone.<\/p>\n
Ten of them – most of whom were from the three groups who had started on the trail – did not live to see the sunrise from Mount Kinabalu.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There is a great deal more detail in the article, which I recommend.<\/p>\n
The earthquake triggered extensive rockfalls from Mount Kinabalu.\u00a0 This image, from the Star Online<\/a>, shows the fresh rockfall scars:<\/p>\n
![\"Mount](\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2015\/07\/15_07-kinabalu-1-e1436424386775.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Mount](\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2015\/07\/15_07-Mount-Kinabalu-2a-e1436424648237.png\")
<\/a>![Wikipedia<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n.<\/p>\nThe earthquake appears to have triggered some shallow landslides in steep forested slopes and a very large number of rockfalls on the near vertical cliff faces of Mount Kinabalu.\u00a0 Interestingly, the less steep upper faces seem to have been affected far less.\u00a0 A detailed inspection suggests that there are in fact multiple comparatively small rockfall sources across the faces, each of which has triggered the release of material from the cliff face below to create a long rockfall scar.\u00a0 There are so many sources that the rockfalls have effectively removed large sections of the mountain side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Straits Times in Singapore has published a detailed account of the Mount Kinabalu earthquake and rockfalls from the perspective of the school party that was struck by the debris on the mountain slopes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":15454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[537],"tags":[23,469,959,244,56,314],"class_list":["post-15453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earthquake-induced-landslide","tag-earthquake","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report","tag-malaysia","tag-rockfall","tag-se-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kinabalu_Park#\/media\/File:Mount_kinabalu_01.png\"){kind=link}