To witness this high-profile experiment, a news crew joined officials and scientists to watch the failure at the toe of the slope.\u00a0 Sadly, the failure that was triggered was both larger and more mobile than had been anticipated.\u00a0 The landslide mass overwhelmed the observers, burying them in the debris.\u00a0 There is a New York Times article about the landslide<\/a> – it reports that 15 people were killed and another nine were seriously injured.<\/p>\n Loyal reader Alasdair pointed out to me that there is a remarkable video of the 1971 Kanagawa Prefecture event on the British Pathe News website<\/a>. \u00a0 Astonishingly, the video captures the debris rushing down the slope towards the observers:-<\/p>\n British Pathe image of The 1971 Kanagawa prefecture landslide disaster. Still from the video by British Pathe.<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n .<\/p>\n Shortly after the video was captured the cameraman and the camera were buried by the landslide debris.\u00a0 Fortunately he survived and the film was recovered.<\/p>\n This was a true tragedy, showing how poorly understood landslides were at the time.\u00a0 Since then, there have been many landslide experiments using flumes<\/a>, artificial slopes<\/a> and, for example at Selborne<\/a> and Ruedlingen<\/a>, the induced failure of slopes in natural materials.\u00a0 Exquisite care is now taken to ensure that people are not located at the toe of the slope, or close to it, when the failure is initiated. A great deal has been learnt from these experiments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1971, a landslide experiment in Kanagawa Prefecture by the the Science and Technology Agency of Japan went disastrously wrong, killing 15 people at the toe of the slope. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[881,831,469,361,29234],"class_list":["post-33443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landslide-video","tag-east-asia","tag-experiment-2","tag-featured","tag-japan","tag-landsldie-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33443","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=33443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2020\/03\/20_03-Pathe-1.jpg\")