Three landslide-induced railway incidents in a single day

News today of three different incidents from around the world:
1. New Zealand
NZ Herald reports that a milk train hit a landslide in Manawatu Gorge.  Fortunately there were no injuries, or even a need to cry over spilt milk...



2. India
Bangalore Mirror reports that three coaches of the Thiruvananthapuram-Mangalore Express train were buried by a landslide in a narrow cutting at Mulunthurthy.  Three people were injured, plus there were some minor injuries during the evacuation.

3. Canada
Various Canadian newspapers report that there was a serious landslide-induced derailment of a freight train at St-Lazare in western Quebec.  The accident trapped the injured train crew in their cab, requiring that they were rescued by firefighters.  Heavy rainfall was reported to be the trigger.  The images of the site, from the Montreal Gazette, are impressive:

 

 Landslides represent  an important risk to railways in upland areas, and where extensive earthworks have been used.  Railway companies expend huge amounts of resource mitigating the threat, usually with success.  Incidents are quite rare, but previous examples described on this site include:
May 2010: 19 killed when a train struck a landslide in China;
April 2010: Nine people killed when a train was struck by a landslide in northern Italy;
July 2009: Four people killed when a train struck a landslide from a cutting in China;
Dec 2008: A train was struck by a flowslide formed from power station ash in Tennessee, USA;

Remarkable NASA imagery of catastrophic flooding around Manchhar Lake in Pakistan

NASA have provided the most dramatic evidence yet of the catastrophic floods that are occurring around Manchhar (Manchar) Lake in Pakistan (see my post yesterday on this issue).  This image was captured by the ALI instrument on 18th September:

Compare this with an image taken of the same area just three days earlier:

Or the Google Earth image of the same area, which was collected in May this year:

Geo-TV, an independent TV station in Pakistan, reports that some of the breaches that are causing these floods are now 1 km wide, whilst NTDTV notes that the number of people displaced by this most recent component of the floods may be as high as 250,000. 


The breaches have allowed the water level in the main body of the lake to fall slightly, bringing some relief elsewhere, but with new areas continuing to experience flooding that is not cause for much overall cheer.

Pakistan flood update

The Pakistan flood crisis drags slowly on, and probably has at least a month to go before the waters fully recede.  Although the news coverage of the event is now little more than a drumbeat in the background, huge numbers of people are still being affected for the first time by this event.  The current crisis is focused on Mancchar Lake, which has been the destination of the waters that have travelled down the "ghost" parallel water course to the west of the main Indus channel, as shown very clearly by this NASA image:

The key iprblem at Manchhar has been that the waterways that allow the lake to drain are inadequate for the task, which has allowed the lake level to rise, causing new flood damage.  The reasons for this are clear from the following Google Earth image, taken before the flood:

In recent years the lake has suffered from inadequate inflows and serious salinity problems, to the extent that last year water was diverted into the lake from the Indus to improve water quality.  This of course shows that the need to have adequate drainage to allow large inflows to be released has not been a pressing issue of late. Thus, the two channels lining the lake to the Indus are too small to deal with the inflow:

In order to drain the excess water in the lake, the levees have been breached in eight places (I am unsure whether these breaches are natural or artificial), but the water level is reportedly still rising, and according to the UN 100,000 people have been displaced in 215 villages.   

Meanwhile the World Food Program have produced a report, available online here, that documents the scale of the impacts of the floods to date.  There are a number of useful aspects of this report, not least the following map that shows the extent of the floods:

Note that the data notes that there is no data for the northern regions, which of course were also very badly affected.  The upshot is that the statistics in the report under-represent the true impacts.  Nonetheless the statistics are eye-watering:

• 14.1 million people directly affected
• 392,786 damaged houses.
• 728,192 destroyed houses
• 7,600 destroyed schools
• 436 health facilities damaged or destroyed
• Overall production loss of sugar cane, paddy and cotton is estimated to be 13.3 million tonnes
• 2 million hectares of standing crops were either lost or damaged.
• 1.2 million head of livestock (excluding poultry) lost
• 14 million livestock are at risk due to fodder shortages and heightened risk of disease.

Of course it is important to consider these impacts in the context of the pre-existing situation in Pakistan.  This map, also from the WFP report, shows the state of food security in most of Pakistan before the floods.  Much of northern and western Pakistan were considered to be extremely food insecure. The central swathe of Pakistan most seriously affected by the floods was in a better (though in most cases not ideal) food security state:

The effect of these flood will be to plunge a large part of Pakistan into a state of extreme food insecurity through the coming winter, at a time when houses, infrastructure and health facilities are seriously compromised. 

Tangjiashan again - and a possible new Chinese flowslide

Back in 2008 I dedicated a great deal of space on this blog to the extraordinary efforts by the Chinese Army to draining the landslide lake at Tangjiashan, just above the town of Beichuan, which was created by the May 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake. 

 These efforts were ultimately successful, but in my visit to the site in Spring 2009 it was clear that a threat remained at the site in the form of another block of material that was showing signs of deformation. Over the last few days this area has received very high levels of rainfall.  Yesterday, Xinhua reported that a 300,000 cubic metre block has detached from the scarp above the barrier, and blocked the river to a depth of 10 metres:

"More than 6,200 residents were relocated Tuesday as torrential rains pounded Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County in southwest China's Sichuan Province, local authorities said Tuesday...Some 300,000 cubic meters of debris brought by the landslide caused a dam, blocking the lake's outlet. The dam's lowest point is 10 meters higher than the present water level, the statement said.  Debris still continue to come down from the hills, and if there were more rains, then the lake level would further rise, threatening the lives of people in nearby townships.The rains had disrupted the normal life of 58,000 local residents in the county, causing huge economic losses, the statement said."

China is well-versed in dealing with these hazards, but given the magnitude of the destruction in the Beichuan area, such events must cause great heart-ache.

It is clear that the elevated level of landslide activity in the aftermath of the landslide is a major issue.  I am travelling to Chengdu on Sunday, so will see whether I can ascertain more information about these issues.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports a probable flowslide failure in a tin mine in Guangdong yesterday:

Zijin Mining Group Co. said a dam built to hold tin-mining waste collapsed in China’s Guangdong province following torrential rain, less than three months after one of its copper mines leaked toxic waste into a river.About 60 centimeters (24 inches) of rain from Typhoon Fanapi and mud and rock slides triggered the accident at the company’s Yinyan tin mine at about 10 a.m. local time today, Shanghang, Fujian province-based Zijin said in a statement. 

China has been impacted by a series of these events in recent years, including one that caused multiple fatalities in 2008.  There appears to be a strong need to improve the safety of these facilities before another major accident occurs.

Gifts and Perils of Landslides

Ken Hewitt has written a wonderful article for Scientific American entitled "Gifts and Perils of Landslides", in which he examines the inter-relationship between the development of society and the occurrence of landslides in the Upper Indus valleys.  Ken is the guru of high mountain landslides in Pakistan, having spent many field seasons mapping rock avalanche deposits in the remote upper valleys of the Hindu Kush.  The article is available online at the following link:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2010/5/gifts-and-perils-of-landslides

His key point is that these giant landslides create both destruction and benefits to humans in this very rugged topography, the latter because they create terrain that is fertile (e.g. on lake beds formed behind landslide dams) and less steep. 

The piece will be accompanied in due course by a slideshow, which will be online here.  This is not yet available.

Meanwhile, the Pamir Times has an image of restarted works on the Attabad landslide, the aim of which is to widen and then, I understand, to deepen the spillway:

Landslides in Art Part 7 - Jennifer Williams

Regular readers will know that I occasionally highlight a piece of art featuring landslides.  This is usually a piece of visual art (such as this and this), but occasionally it is a song or even an installation.  This time I thought I'd feature a piece of art by the American artist Jennifer Williams, who paints environmentally-orientated pieces using acrylic on birch panels.  Jennifer works mostly in the Pacific Northwest, where both the landscape and the sky is large and colourful.  This is reflected in her portfolio of work, which resonates strongly through its depictions of the landscape of hazards. 


I'd like to highlight here two pieces.  First there is a painting called lahar, created as part of a portfolio encompassing the natural regeneration of the Mount St Helens area:

Second, and for me more strikingly, is a piece entitled simply "Landslide", painted in 2008, and visible through the Waterworks Gallery website:

To me this captures the chaos and ruin of the catastrophic earthflows we see in the Himalayas and other high mountain environments during heavy rainfall.  Amazing stuff.

Earthquake damage in Christchurch - an ironic billboard

This billboard, which predates the Darfield earthquake, was attached to a building in the Central Business District of Christchurch in New Zealand:

Do you think this is what they had in mind when they described the "open plan office with balcony access" and "cool funky office environment"?: