A portion of the embankment on MS26 in George County Mississippi failed after heavy rains and flooding caused by Hurricane Ida. It created a hole about 20 feet deep and 50 feet across late on Monday night, and I can imagine it was difficult for motorists to see until it was too late. There were approximately 7 cars that fell into the crater, 2 fatalities, and 10 injuries with 3 of those listed in critical condition. More info at the Sun Herald. Credit to the Landslide Blog.
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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.