Fellow geo-blogger David Petley of Durham University posted today about the 105th anniversary of the Frank Landslide in Canada. The slide had an estimated volume of 30 million cubic meters and took all of about 100 seconds to travel down the mountain and engulf a portion of a nearby coal mining town. 76 people were killed, and a number of bodies were never recovered because of the massive amount of material. Since 2003, they have installed real-time monitoring equipment to warn if the mountain fails again, which seems likely based on an interesting video (requires Windows Media Player). It shows some of the massive tension cracks at the top of the limestone mountain. (Photo by Natural Resources Canada by way of Dave’s Landslide Blog)
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Devil’s Slide Tunnel, Project Updates and Geotechnical Info
Devil’s Slide is an infamous landslide along California’s Highway 1 or Pacific Coast Highway near Pacifica, just south of the San Francisco Bay area. Caltrans’ Devil’s Slide Tunnel project is an effort to bypass that slide and make the heavily traveled roadway safe for drivers and to eliminate the maintenance and traffic hassles caused by slope failures blocking the road. We first covered the project back in September of 2007 when the tunnel portion of the project commenced. In that post, you can find a Google Earth KML File showing the location of the tunnels and the new bridges associated with the project. In this post, I’ll provide you with some updated progress information as well as some background on the geotechnical and other aspects of the project. More links and videos are at the end of the post. (Photo by Kim Komenich, San Francisco Chronicle). […]
No quick fix for huge landslide near Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Oregon Landslide News and Map
This is definitely the season for landslides, mudslides, debris flows and other mayhem in Oregon and elsewhere in the pacific northwest. It seems like every time I turn around there is another Google Alert in my inbox about a landslide related issue in that area. Having a hard time keeping up with it all, I decided to try something new. Click through to see a map of automatically updated landslide news in Oregon. Lets call it a Beta…so we’ll see if it works out. If it does, maybe I’ll try something similar for other areas or other items that tend to make it into the news. (Photo by Ross William Hamilton/The Oregonian)