Landslides and buses

A nasty landslide this week in Peru triggered some thoughts about the occurrence of landslides that kill the passngers on buses. The event that triggered these thoughts occurred on 6th February when heavy rain dislodged a boulder hit a bus and knocked it into the Tarma River in Junin Province in Peru. Seven people were killed and a further 23 were injured.

TV3 news in New Zealand had this picture of the remains of the vehicle:

Such events appear on the database quite often, so I thought it might be interesting just to look at the 2007 data to see where and when they occur. These are the bus-related landslides within the Durham database:

Date	Country	Location	Fatalities	Injuries
24/02/2007	Pakistan	Sanadhi (Paniola) village, 15 kilometres away of Rawalakot, Kashmir	15	5
12/03/2007	India	Nauliband area of the Rudraprayag district, Uttarakhand	18	32
02/04/2007	China	Pengshui, Chongqing Municipality	7	1
25/05/2007	China	Shimian to Hanyuan county in the central western city of Ya'an, Sichuan	10	14
04/07/2007	Mexico	Eloxochitlan, Puebla	32
20/08/2007	Nepal	Palpa-Tamghas road, Palpa	25
02/09/2007	India	Ghansali town in Tehri district, Uttarakhand	19	20
17/09/2007	India	Rudraprayag district, Uttarakhand	19	28
11/10/2007	India	Vishnuprayag, Chamoli district of Uttarakhand	41
20/11/2007	China	Badong county, Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in southwest Hubei	35	1
		Totals	221	101

It is clear that there is a particular problem with landslides affecting buses in mountain areas, particularly in Asia. Over 200 deaths is a very high impact indeed. The impacts occur in one of three main ways:
1. Buses being hit by landslides or by rockfalls and knocked into a river (as in the case of Peru this week)
2. Buses being buried by landslide debris (this happened in the Pakistan example)
3. Buses being affected by a human induced failure. The Badong event in China was the result of a rockfall triggered by tunnel construction.

There are occasional other factors too - in one case the accident occurred because the driver was speeding to attempt to avoid a rockfall. I suspect that no-one has ever undertaken a systematic study of bus-related landslide fatalities. This is probably an important topic.

January 2007 final map

Below is the fatal landslide distribution map for January 2008. I have coded the rainfall induced landslides as black dots and those caused by other causes as red dots.

The January 2008 fatal landslide distribution map. Rainfall-induced landslides are the black dots, those caused by other processes (mostly quarrying and construction) are in red. Click on the map for a larger version.

A few observations on the data:

• I recorded 20 fatal landslides in the month with a total of 106 fatalities
• Of these, only six were triggered by rainfall, accounting for 56 deaths.
• There is a notable cluster of landslides in northern India. However, most of these were triggered construction or quarrying, so it probably represents just a coincidence.
• Overall, the total is below the long term average for the number of fatalities occurring in January.

I welcome any thoughts, observations or comments.