{"id":17,"date":"2010-09-10T21:05:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T21:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2010\/09\/10\/ruapehu-lahar-information\/"},"modified":"2010-10-21T13:35:04","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T17:35:04","slug":"ruapehu-lahar-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2010\/09\/10\/ruapehu-lahar-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruapehu lahar information"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the many highlights of the splendid IAEG Congress in Auckland this week was a talk by GNS geologist Chris Massey on the 18th March 2007 lahar at Mount Ruapehu on North Island.  The lahar occurred as a result of the failure of a tephra wall holding back the crater lake at the summit, and is shown by this NASA image:<\/p>\n

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The potential for a lahar had been anticipated and the site was intensively monitored with real time instruments such as water level sensors and geophones; with  two web cams; and with periodic surveys using a terrestrial laser scanner.  An emergency plan was in place and worked well.  The need for caution was undeniable – on 24th December 1954 a lahar from the same site demolished a railway bridge at Tangiwai<\/a>, killing 151 people on a train that tried to cross a bridge that had been destroyed by the lahar.<\/p>\n

The event has been written up in a paper (Massey et al.<\/i> 2010), and there is a spectacular set of images of the event captured by the web cam available here<\/a> (NB it took me a while to get my eye into these images).    <\/p>\n

An interesting aspect of this event is that one can examine just how good the natural hazard science community is at assessing hazard.  There is a New Zealand Civil Defence report, written in 2002, about the threat of a lahar at Ruapehu online here<\/a>. 

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Reference<\/b>
Massey, C., Manville, V., Hancox, G., Keys, H., Lawrence, C., and McSaveney, M. 2010.  Out-burst flood (lahar) triggered by retrogressive landsliding, 18 March 2007 at Mt Ruapehu, New Zealand\u2014a successful early warning.  Landslides<\/i> 7<\/b> (3),303-315<\/span>, DOI:<\/span> 10.1007\/s10346-009-0180-5.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the many highlights of the splendid IAEG Congress in Auckland this week was a talk by GNS geologist Chris Massey on the 18th March 2007 lahar at Mount Ruapehu on North Island.  The lahar occurred as a result of the failure of a tephra wall holding back the crater lake at the summit, and is shown by this NASA image: The potential for a lahar had been anticipated …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,7,33],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lahar","tag-new-zealand","tag-volcanic-landslide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","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=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}