A landslide struck the village of Gjerdrum, which is about 25km (15 miles) north-east of the Norwegian capital, Oslo. The slide is already being called a “quick clay” landslide by officials. It occurred around 4 am local time on December 30, 2020, and injured 10 people, one critically, and forced some 700 residents to evacuate. As of December 31, authorities were searching for 10 missing residents. Rescues were only possible by helicopter because of the unstable situation. They are also employing dogs and drones in the search for the missing. The slide measures 300m by 700m (985ft by 2,300ft). Another quick clay landslide occurred near the town of Alta, Norway earlier this year.
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Sea to Sky Highway Landslide
Earlier this month, there was a massive slope failure on the "Sea to Sky" highway in British Columbia. It is interesting to note that this same area had a large rockslide in 1965, and a photo of this failure is featured on the cover of the classic text, Rock Slope Engineering by Hoek and Bray. The media played up the aspect that this highway is one of the only ways to access the site of the 2010 Winter Olympic games hosted by Vancouver.
The composite image above shows the book cover and the recent rockslide event (Photo credit: Erik Eberhardt of the University of British Columbia by way of Dave’s Landslide Blog). Dave has done a fabulous job collecting photos, facts and links from around the web. In a follow up post, he added some additional photos and discussion. I recently came across an article that described how the highway originally was slated to have a tunnel bypassing the slide, but that the price tag of $200 million (CAN?) for a 1-km stretch killed the project.