{"id":8397,"date":"2014-03-20T12:40:02","date_gmt":"2014-03-20T12:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=8397"},"modified":"2014-03-20T12:40:02","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T12:40:02","slug":"dawlish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2014\/03\/20\/dawlish\/","title":{"rendered":"Dawlish: inducing landslide failure using firehoses"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Dawlish landslide<\/h5>\n

The Dawlish landslide is one of the many problems that arose on the mainline railway line that links the southwest of England with London.\u00a0 This is a historic line that takes a very challenging route along the coastline.\u00a0 It has a long history of landslides, as my earlier Landslides in Art<\/a> posts showed.\u00a0 In the recent winter storms a large section of track washed out, and a series of landslides have also caused significant problems.\u00a0 Clearly Network Rail (the track managers) would like to reinstate the track quickly and to have a long term solution, both of which are difficult.\u00a0 One key problem is a large (reportedly 30,000 tonnes, although some sources have suggested it is even larger) slide above the line.\u00a0 The landslide is shown in a very nice drone \/ UAV video collected by the BBC and available via the Eyes of Dawlish Facebook page<\/a>.\u00a0 This is a screenshot of the landslide from that video:<\/p>\n

\"Dawlish<\/a><\/p>\n

..<\/p>\n

Mitigating the Dawlish landslide<\/h5>\n

On first inspection the slide looks to be a slump – there is certainly a large displaced block.\u00a0 Network Rail have started an attempt to deal with this landslide that can best described as being impressive and perhaps even audacious.\u00a0 Since the weekend they have been using high pressure fire pumps to push water into the landslide in order to induce failure – if you look carefully you can see this ongoing operation in the image, with several streams of water being pumped onto the slide.\u00a0 Presumably the intention is to fail the landslide onto the track, and then to remove the debris.<\/p>\n

This type of approach is occasionally proposed for landslides, but is rarely attempted.\u00a0 There are several reasons for this.\u00a0 First, actually it is rather difficult to get a natural slope to behave as you want it to.\u00a0 So, for example, there is a risk that the slide might partially fail and then stop, leaving an unstable mass that is dangerous to clear.\u00a0 Or the failure might be larger than expected, though that is unlikely here. The greatest danger is that the landslide does not move at all, leaving a now even less stable lump of rock above the asset in question.<\/p>\n

I am not sure what is going on at Dawlish.\u00a0 Today the Herald Express<\/a> reports that the army are involved in the operation, according to the BBC <\/a>perhaps even using armoured excavators to clear the debris.\u00a0 It will certainly be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few days, and I am in admiration of Network Rail for what they are doing at that site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Dawlish in SW England Network Rail are trying to mitigate a landslide by inducing failure using fire hoses<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":8399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[585,469,959,80,133],"class_list":["post-8397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-devon","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report","tag-railway","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8397","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=8397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}