Video of a landslide striking and derailing a freight train near Seattle

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been enjoying watching the 2010 Olympic Winter games over the past few days. If you have, you know that Whistler is the venue for many of the sports including alpine skiing, luge, skeleton, bobsled, ski jumping, biathlon and cross-country skiing among others. The Whistler area is located about 50-miles or so North of Vancouver. In order to get to Whistler, you need to drive along Highway 99, better known as the Sea-to-Sky Highway.  This highway has a long history of geotechnical problems, including some significant structurally controlled rockslides and landslides.  In the years leading up to these Olympic Games a fair amount of work was done on the highway with some significant geotechnical innovations.

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China has been getting pounded recently by heavy rains and flooding. Here are a few stories I’ve come across in this department. Three Gorges Dam flooding turns deadly; dozens missing in China – Source: CSMonitor.com […]

Grouting work done earlier in the week was a possible cause of a bulge in the lining of a train tunnel under the River Thames. Two trains hit the bulge before the line was closed, […]