Landslide Causes Train to Derail into Mississippi River

[Updated May 30, 2008] I forgot to publish this post to the front page, whoops! The two links still have excellent information. In particular, Dave’s Landslide Blog has coverage of the many landslide lakes and the efforts to breach some of them. [/Update]

The latest numbers according to AFP, Worldwide News Agency, is 71,000 dead, missing or buried and over 5 million homeless. There were many victims that were buried by landslides and rockfall. In the past few days 200 rescue workers have been buried by mudslides.

For more coverage on landslides related to the earthquake, I recommend Dave’s Landslide Blog. Geology.com also has very comprehensive coverage as well. (AFP Photo)

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For those of you following the landslide in residential La Jolla California known as the Soledad Mountain Road landslide, it made the news again a couple days ago when a section of the slide re-activated and slid 10-ft down the hill. Doesn’t sound like too big of a deal to me, no additional houses damaged. I’m curious how it related to the shear pins they installed a couple of months ago.

Additionally, the San Diego City Attorney has released a report detailing the sequence of events leading up to the landslide. One interesting note is that the Mayor of San Diego is in hot water with the City Attorney’s office for hiring outside legal council to handle the legal aspects of the landslide. According to the City Attorney’s office, he wasn’t allowed to do that, but so far the City Attorney hasn’t stepped in to force the outside attorney(s) to drop the case saying it would open the City up to even more liability.

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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! […]