{"id":37130,"date":"2021-03-25T07:41:23","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T07:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=37130"},"modified":"2021-03-25T07:41:23","modified_gmt":"2021-03-25T07:41:23","slug":"wongawallan-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2021\/03\/25\/wongawallan-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Wongawallan: a damaging landslide in Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wongawallan: a damaging landslide in Australia<\/h4>\n

The eastern side of Australia<\/a> has suffered devastating rains over the last few days, causing extensive flooding.\u00a0 There have been a number of landslides too, of which the most spectacular may be the one at Wongawallan in the Gold Coast hinterland in Queensland<\/a>.\u00a0 This landslide appears to have affected the grounds of a very beautiful house.\u00a0 The image below, from Reddit<\/a>, shows the site before the landslide:-<\/p>\n

\"The

The site of the Wongawallan landslide. Image via Reddit<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The image below shows the aftermath of the landslide, again the image is from Reddit<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"The

The aftermath of the Wongawallan landslide in Australia. Image via Reddit<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Clearly for the homeowner this is a disastrous landslide, causing enormous levels of damage.\u00a0 Looking at Google Earth, it appears that the property was constructed between 2004 and 2009. The mound upon which it is located appears to be made ground, initially without the terraces, which appear to have been under construction is an image in November 2013.\u00a0 I wonder why the slope was terraced at this later stage?\u00a0 The Google Earth images might provide a clue, but I do not wish to speculate.\u00a0 The location of the landslide is -27.880\u00b0 153.245\u00b0.<\/p>\n

The image below shows the state of the terraced slope, and the adjacent slopes, in 2016:-<\/p>\n

\"Google

Google Earth image of the site of the Wongawallan landslide in Australia.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The obvious part of the failure is the section of terraced slope directly below the house, but the landslide appears to have extended all the way down to the gates, a distance of about 110 metres:-<\/p>\n

\"The

The lower part of the slope failure at Wongawallan. Image via 9 News<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

There are two obvious possible failure mechanisms here.\u00a0 It could be that the terraced mound has failed, loading the lower part of the slope, inducing failure lower down.\u00a0 An alternative is that the ground beneath the mound has failed, with the instability retrogressing though the mound.\u00a0 A proper site investigation is needed to ascertain the cause.<\/p>\n

The impacts are unfortunately likely to be extremely expensive, and to be very disruptive for the owners of a beautiful property.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wongawallan: a landslide caused by the recent bout of heavy rainfall has severely damaged land around a house in Queensland, Australia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":37137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,1],"tags":[176,469,959],"class_list":["post-37130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-images","category-uncategorized","tag-australia","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37130","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=37130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}