Machu Picchu at risk from Landslides

An Italian farmer and his family had an unbelievably close call with some house-sized boulders. You have to see the pictures to believe it. The boulders were dislodged during a landslide on January 21 in Northern Italy. One of the boulders smashed through the barn and courtyard of the farm and cut a swath through their vineyard before stopping near a boulder from some previous rockfall / landslide event. That older boulder is even bigger, about the same size as the entire farmhouse and big enough to be seen on Google Earth! See below or download the KMZ file.

More Photos

[Editor] See more after the break. [/Editor]

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Some juicy geoengineering news items in this post. I could turn just about all of them into a separate blog post if I had time, maybe I still will for some of them. Don’t miss this list! All of the links are active when you view it on the site. If you’re looking at this in your RSS feed reader or on your daily email, you won’t see the actual links, sorry.

• San Diego settles landslide suits for $284,000 – San Jose Mercury News
• Slip On Weak Layer – GEO-SLOPE International Ltd.
  An example analysis using SLOPE/W software.
• UK’s first commercial scale geothermal power plant set to start construction in October – Ground Engineering (GE) Magazine
• Some reflections on the Eyjafjallajoekull ash cloud – Dave’s Landslide Blog
  As usual, Dr. Dave has some great insights into this geologic hazard that is currently dominating the news.
• Port of Miami tunnel project on track for June start – MiamiHerald.com via ASCE SmartBrief
• Louisiana receives $81.5 million in new federal aid for repair of roads and bridges damaged by Hurricane Katrina – NOLA.com
• New imagery from the Qinghai earthquake | Google Earth Blog
• Geogrids remedy poor site soils at World Cup stadium in South Africa – Geosynthetics Magazine
• Geo-Engineering Reconnaissance of the February 27, 2010 Maule, Chile Earthquake, Version 1: April 15, 2010 – Geoengineer.org Press Center
  The GEER is an NSF-funded group that was created to collect perishable data in the wake of extreme events (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, landslides, or floods) in the interests of learning from the events to advance the state of geoengineering practice. This report on the earthquake was produced by over 40 lead authors and contributing authors from universities and consulting companies around the world.
• A Decade of Safety Success, March/April 2010 Public Roads

…And 13 more! […]

Every second of October, geotechnical engineers around the world remember Karl Terzaghi on his birthday! Terzaghi is the father of soil mechanics, and I don’t think it is cliche to say he is also the […]