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 | | Sanadhi (Paniola) village, 15 kilometres away of Rawalakot, | 15 | 5 |
12/03/2007 | | Nauliband area of the Rudraprayag district, Uttarakhand | 18 | 32 |
02/04/2007 | | Pengshui, | 7 | 1 |
25/05/2007 | | Shimian to Hanyuan county in the central western city of | 10 | 14 |
04/07/2007 | | | 32 | |
20/08/2007 | | Palpa-Tamghas road, Palpa | 25 | |
02/09/2007 | | Ghansali town in Tehri district, Uttarakhand | 19 | 20 |
17/09/2007 | | Rudraprayag district, Uttarakhand | 19 | 28 |
11/10/2007 | | Vishnuprayag, Chamoli district of Uttarakhand | 41 | |
20/11/2007 | | Badong county, Enshi Tujia and | 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.
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