{"id":21123,"date":"2017-01-22T09:10:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T09:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=21123"},"modified":"2017-01-22T09:10:46","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T09:10:46","slug":"nanzhang-county-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2017\/01\/22\/nanzhang-county-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Nanzhang County, Hubei: 12 killed as a hotel is crushed by a rockslope failure"},"content":{"rendered":"
Nanzhang County, Hubei: 12 killed as a hotel is crushed by a rockslope failure<\/h5>\n

On Friday night a major rockslope failure occurred on a steep slope behind the Mirage Hotel in the Haishishenlou holiday village, in Nanzhang County, Hubei, China.\u00a0 The hotel was crushed; 12 people, including the owner, were killed in the dining room.\u00a0 There were three survivors (whilst two of the victims died after being rescued).\u00a0 Xinhua reports today<\/a> that the remains of all of the victims have been recovered.<\/p>\n

There are a range of images available of the event<\/a>, most of which focus on the rescue operation.\u00a0 The one that best depicts the circumstances is this one, via Xinhua<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Nanzhang

The aftermath of the landslide in Nanzhang County, Hubei, China on Friday, via Xinhua<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Based on the above this appears to be a massive rockslope failure – reports suggest 3000 cubic metres – that has fallen directly onto the building.\u00a0 The reports suggest that the largest blocks were 150 tonnes, but I would suspect based on the image that this may be an underestimate.<\/p>\n

The slope behind the hotel is interesting.\u00a0 Whilst the scar of the rockfall is not clear from this image – the blocks may have come from higher up the slope – the vertical discontinuities (joints) in the mass are clear both immediately behind the hotel and in the adjacent slopes.\u00a0 These provide a ready-made release surface for the rockfall.\u00a0 We would normally expect that a good site investigation would be able to determine the hazard posed by these joints, but I cannot comment on what happened here.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, there is no suggestion of a trigger in the news reports, although the images of the rescuers do suggest that they are dressing for cold (but possibly not very cold) weather.\u00a0 The reports also indicate that there were real concerns about the potential for further failures on the slope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday night a major rockslope failure in Nanzhang County, Hubei, China crushed a hotel, killing 12 people and injuring three more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":21130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[16,881,469,1109,959,56,1408],"class_list":["post-21123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-china","tag-east-asia","tag-featured","tag-joint","tag-landslide-report","tag-rockfall","tag-rockslope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21123","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=21123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}