{"id":6748,"date":"2013-07-29T07:22:46","date_gmt":"2013-07-29T07:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=6748"},"modified":"2013-07-29T07:22:46","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T07:22:46","slug":"china-soil-fall-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2013\/07\/29\/china-soil-fall-video\/","title":{"rendered":"The China landslide car video – how did the occupants survive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many news outlets have been running the dramatic footage, shot on 13th July in Shaanxi Province, of a car being buried by a landslide.\u00a0 If you haven’t seen it, you can view it here<\/a> or below:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=mncB6TNR5Tk<\/p>\n

..<\/p>\n

The central theme of the coverage appears to be a sense of amazement that the landslide was survivable.\u00a0 So how did they survive?\u00a0 Well, there is certainly an element of serendipity here for two reasons.\u00a0 First, there is a critical issue of timing.\u00a0 By what is probably a matter of a single second, the landslide impacted on the road just ahead of the car, which had time to brake before being buried.\u00a0 As the screenshot below shows, if the car had been traveling just a little quicker the landslide would have buried it directly:<\/p>\n

\"13_07<\/a>..<\/p>\n

The driver managed to bring the car to a stop on the edge of the impact zone.\u00a0 The second fortunate element is that the landslide debris then pushed the car away from the main impact zone.\u00a0 This is a screenshot from the site at the point after the car stopped moving forward and had started to be pushed laterally – note the location of the brake lights:<\/p>\n

\"13_07<\/a><\/p>\n

..<\/p>\n

Towards the end of the incident the car had been pushed laterally away from the main impact area.\u00a0 This is the video as the first two passengers escaped:<\/p>\n

\"13_07<\/a><\/p>\n

And finally, the landslide appears to be mostly formed from soil (and a small tree or two).\u00a0 So, although the video shows some large blocks falling, there are no lumps of large rock on the road, suggesting that these soil blocks shattered on impact.\u00a0 The strength of the car was sufficiently high that it wasn’t crushed, and so the passengers were protected.\u00a0 If this had been a rockfall the outcome would have been quite different:<\/p>\n

\"13_07<\/a><\/p>\n

..<\/p>\n

All of which serves to illustrate two key elements of landslide mitigation.\u00a0 These are first that timing is everything, such that the easiest way to stop people from being killed in landslides is to ensure that no-one is in their path.\u00a0 And second that mechanism and material are crucial – the hazard posed by a rockfall is very different from that of a soil fall.\u00a0 Determining the mechanism of a likely landslide is essential if its possible impact is to be reduced effectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How did the passengers in the car filmed being hit by a soil fall in Shaanxi, China survive the landslide?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":6751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[16,469,963,734],"class_list":["post-6748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-video","tag-china","tag-featured","tag-landslide-video","tag-soil-fall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6748","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=6748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}