Massive Landslide Coats Glacier Bay National Park's Johns Hopkins Glacier

A massive landslide that peeled off the flanks of Lituya Mountain in Glacier Bay National Park ran more than 5 miles atop the Johns Hopkins Glacier deep within the Fairweather Mountain Range of Glacier Bay National Park. Photos by Drake Olson, chart via Dr. Marten Geertsema.

A massive landslide, one of the biggest ever seen in North America and which registered on seismographs in Canada and the United States, has covered a more than 5-mile run of the Johns Hopkins Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve like chocolate frosting on cake.

Coarsing down an unnamed valley that descends beneath 11,750-foot Lituya Mountain in Alaska's Fairweather Mountains, the muddy flow sloshed back and forth through the twists and turns of the valley, rattling and shaking the surrounding ridges and mountain flanks, which contributed their own snowy avalanches along the route.

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Rise in landslides linked to climate change

IRELAND and much of northern Europe is seeing an increasing number of landslides, coinciding with more extreme weather patterns. Ireland had previously been considered a relatively benign environment as far as landslides were concerned. Landslides were previously explained by long dry spells that could cause hillside bogs to crack. Once rain comes down heavily the dry bog just slips away. “But we can’t say that this year. It is now more likely it is heavy rain causing mobility between a layer of rock and bog above it." Last week in the Geevagh, Co Sligo, area, the mountain “just slid down, the river burst its banks and flowed diagonally across the pitch and the damage has been devastating”.





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Kerry Co Co says landslide was worst in 30 years
Image: A car is trapped in the the mudlside in Maughaknockane, Listowel.

Kerry County Council has said that the landslide which hit the north of the county at the weekend was the worst in 30 years.

Up to 5,000 homes remain without water this evening, after mud polluted the area's two main water sources.

Engineers are working to make an alternative water supply available on a temporary basis but a 'boil water' notice remains in place.

The landslide, which was up to 16 feet deep in places, blocked roads and engulfed two bridges.

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Strange Storms Creating Mudslides

Breaking Earth News
California, USA
Image: A mudslide closed two roads in the foothill community of Sierra Madre as wet and windy weather bounced through Southern California for a second day.

Sierra Madre police and fire officials are clearing debris from mudslides today on the heels of a wild spring thunderstorm that wreaked havoc across Southern California on Thursday.

The weather conditions were very different from those nearly a month ago, when about 1,000 residents were evacuated from 200 homes in the upper part of Sierra Madre during a wildfire as Southern California broiled in record-breaking heat. The Sierra Madre fire ended up scorching more than 580 acres over a week and primed the area for mudslides.

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PNG highlands battle landslide aftermath

New Guinea
State of Emergency Request

Thousands of people are battling the aftermath of landslides and flooding which hit PNG's highlands during the weekend.

The landslides crushed houses and farms, leaving more than 2,000 people displaced.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA - Hundreds displaced by landslide in PNG’s Simbu Province. Gera village near Kundiawa has been declared a disaster zone after a massive landslide. The slide crushed a number of houses, four church buildings, food gardens, livestock areas, and displaced over 2,000 people

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Cambodians Missing, Homeless After Landslide

Cambodia
Image: A large section of land along Cambodia's Tonle Sap River in a crowded area of the capital, Phnom Penh, collapsed and sank April 1, taking dozens of homes and an unknown number of people with it. Photo: RFA

Story: Residents in a crowded area of the Cambodian capital were scrambling Tuesday to account for relatives and salvage what they could after a 50-meter bank of the Tonle Sap River slid into the water, leaving some 300 people homeless and an unknown number missing. A large section of land along Cambodia's Tonle Sap River in a crowded area of the capital, Phnom Penh, collapsed and sank April 1, taking dozens of homes and an unknown number of people with it. The area of the landslide was roughly 60 meters long and 30 meters wide

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Indonesians feared dead after torrential rains trigger landslides

Breaking Earth News
Indonesia
Image: Rescue workers search for victims as a truck is seen crushed by landslide in Tawangmangu, Central Java, Indonesia. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Rescuers dug for survivors Wednesday after landslides and floods triggered by days of torrential rain killed dozens of people in western Indonesia.

At least 78 people were feared dead - most of them killed in a single landslide in the Karanganyar district that buried a late-night dinner party, a rescue official said. The victims had just cleaned up a mud-covered home.

Hundreds of soldiers, police and volunteers struggled to get heavy-lifting equipment to villages on the main island of Java, but roads blocked by the mud and flooding were hampering the rescue efforts, Prayitno said.

Lacking the equipment, some rescuers tried searching for survivors by digging into the mountains of mud with their bare hands.

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Massive mud, water wave destroys Mexican village

Image: A Federal Police officer looks for stranded residents, from an aerial view, during an inspection flight of flood affected areas on the outskirts of Villahermosa Nov. 3, 2007. Thousands of people perched on roofs in southern Mexico on Saturday, desperate to be evacuated from flooding caused by heavy rains that has left most of Tabasco state under water and 800,000 people homeless.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
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Mexico, Nov. 6 (Xinhuanet) -- Up to 16 people were feared buried alive after a massive wave of mud and water roared through a Mexican village Monday, officials said.

A landslide blocked an already rain-swollen river and pushed a wall of water and debris over remote San Juan Grijalva, home to about 600 people, most of whom fled into the hills ahead of the advancing wave.

"This village practically disappeared," said Chiapas Gov. Juan Sabines, who was at the scene where rescue workers were digging for possible victims. Helicopters were seeking out residents who had fled into the hills, in order to evacuate them.

The village, 45 miles southwest of Villahermosa, is near the border of heavily flooded Tabasco state and shares the same river systems. The landslide was the latest catastrophe caused by a week of heavy rains and flooding that left 80 percent of Tabasco under water, destroying or damaging the homes of about half a million people.

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Mudslide kills 14 in Costa Rica

Costa Rica & Panama C.A.
Flooding from days of heavy rain left 14 people dead in a mudslide in Costa Rica and sowed chaos in neighbouring Panama, displacing scores of people. The mudslide struck poor homes in Atenas, west of the Costa Rican capital on Thursday in a torrential downpour. Rescuers later found 14 bodies as they picked through the mud, timber and rubble. The mudslide engulfed a complex housing the families of poor farm workers. It was the WORST WEATHER DISASTER FOR YEARS in the Central American country. Parrita on the western Pacific coast was also flooded when rain-swollen rivers burst their banks. To the south-east in central Panama, heavy rain since Friday left two people missing and more than 100 displaced in remote areas. Even worse flooding struck across the Caribbean Sea on the island of Haiti.

Torrential Rains
HAITI - At least 45 people have died in the poverty-stricken island of Haiti as homes were swept away in floods triggered by heavy rain. More than 6000 people have had to leave their flooded homes in Cabaret, where neighbourhoods have been completely submerged. Thousands of families are displaced and hundreds of homes destroyed or damaged across the country. Roads are swamped and plantations wiped out. Farming has been particularly affected and numerous crops have been destroyed after more than a week of rain.

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3,000 evacuated after China landslide blocks river

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Major Landslide Near La Jolla, California

A power pole leans toward a sink hole on Soledad Mountain Road in San Diego. Officials had been in the process of warning residents that the earth was shifting when the collapse occurred about 9 a.m.

(Lenny Ignelzi / Associated Press)

Breaking Earth News
California, USA
SAN DIEGO -- A landslide this morning heavily damaged one home and created a sinkhole about 50 yards long beneath a residential street on Mt. Soledad, a pricey neighborhood on the edge of La Jolla.

"The city is doing everything possible to stabilize the situation and safeguard homes," said Jay Goldstone, San Diego's chief operating officer. "This is a quickly evolving situation."

Goldstone said the only explanation city officials could give for the slide was gravity. The earth had begun to slide in July, with cracks appearing in the street. The movement had accelerated in recent days.

The heavily damaged home appeared to disappear into the sinkhole.

Mayor Jerry Sanders cut short a trip to Washington to return to San Diego.

The road is buckled in the 5700 block of Soledad Mountain Road between Desert View Drive and Palomino Circle.

About 2,500 customers were without power after utility poles fell, officials said.

Videos Included here

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Massive Landslide On Pennsylvania Route 28

A rockslide closed the southbound side of Route 28 between RIDC park and the Harmar exit this morning.

BREAKING EARTH NEWS
Pennsylvania, USA

A rockslide early this morning sent boulders tumbling onto Route 28 in Harmar, shutting down the southbound lane and one of the northbound lanes.

The southbound lane remained closed throughout rush hour as crews worked to clear the rocks. There is only one southbound lane in that area because of ongoing work to secure the hillside, which has been plagued by slides.

The slide also shut down one of the two northbound lanes, but the other was passable.

The incident happened at about 3:45 a.m. One boulder rolled across the highway and smashed into a tractor-trailer. The driver swerved onto the berm, where the rig flipped over onto a hillside above adjacent Freeport Road.

The overturned truck caused a chain-reaction crash involving several cars as drivers slammed on their brakes to avoid it.

Part of the cargo the truck was hauling spilled down the hillside onto Freeport Road, forcing officials to close one southbound lane of that highway.

The combination of the slide and the accident created miles of backups for morning commuters who use those roads to get into town.

Watch Video Coverage (top left) VIDEOS ON DEMAND

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15 dead in Nepal floods, landslides

Photo: Nepalese villagers leave their flooded village in the Banke district of western Nepal, in 2006. Landslides and floods triggered by torrential rains in Nepal have killed at least 15 people in the last three days, officials said Sunday.(AFP/File)

KATHMANDU (AFP) - Landslides and floods triggered by torrential rains in Nepal have killed at least 15 people in the last three days, officials said Sunday.
The deaths took to 183 the toll from monsoon-triggered landslides and floods in the Himalayan nation since June, according to the home ministry.

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Record rainfall ripped open hillsides in Minnesota

Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN
USA

HOKAH -- The rain kept falling, the hillside quivered like a big bowl of Jell-O, and 63-year-old Tom Powell spotted something he had never seen before.

The hillsides gave out on either side of his house, shooting mud and pine trees toward the place where Powell has lived his entire life.

"It looked like little geysers coming down the hill," Powell recalled as he stood amid the mud and wreckage Monday at his property in far southeastern Minnesota.

Powell's story is just one of hundreds spawned by the granddaddy of recorded rainfalls in Minnesota: A National Weather Service gauge near Hokah reportedly had 15.1 inches when it was measured Aug. 19, beating by over four inches the previous state record for a 24-hour rainfall.

PHOTOS

<---The remains of a house sit on a hillside near Hokah, located in far southeastern Minnesota. Hokah got a state record 15.1 inches of rainfall in 24 hours on Aug. 18-19.

<---Vehicles buried in mud in HokahThese vehicles in Hokah, in far southeastern Minnesota, remain buried following recent flash flooding. Hokah received a state record 15.1 inches of rain over 24 hours the weekend of Aug. 19.Matt Russell/Post-Bulletin

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Khongdei landslide: the worst in living memory

India
The Khongdei landslide was the WORST IN LIVING MEMORY. It was a doomsday for the villagers of Khongdei Khuman when their paddy fields, fish, village footpath were carried away by a most fearful and deadly landslide on July 28. A woman working in the fields complained that she felt giddy and her head was spinning, not realizing that the mountain on which she was working was slowly moving down towards the river taking away all the fields located on the hillslope and above due to the unceasing downpour. As she left the field, the mountain started moving down with the sound of thunder and sending up a ball of smoke into the air as seen by neighboring villagers from Shirong. From July 28 to August 4 the nearby villagers heard the sound of the landslide, like the sound of moving vehicles, for days and nights. The Iril river that flows on the eastern side of the landslide portion has been pushed towards the western side burying most of the surrounding fields on the river banks creating three deep lakes with huge stones and mud gathered there due to the landslide. The length of the landslide was roughly about more than 1 km, and its height is 30 minutes walk. If there is rain, this whole portion of hillslope which now remains cracked will go down to its bottom and block the Iril river. “I have never seen such a kind of natural calamity in my lifetime. Now my villagers have to starve as the fields can never be cultivated again." Even the jeepable road which is the lifeline for the villagers has been cut off by the landslide.

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Monumental landslide shakes Yukon's Mount Steele

Yukon Territory, Canada

'I've never seen anything this big, and I've never heard of anything this big.'—Geologist Panya Lipovsk

Geologists in the Yukon want to find out what caused a massive landslide last week that made one of Canada's tallest mountains a little smaller. A piece of Mount Steele, the country's fifth-highest peak, suddenly broke away sometime last week, thundering onto the glacier below. It may have been THE SINGLE LARGEST LANDSLIDE IN LIVING MEMORY IN THE TERRITORY. "I've never seen anything this big, and I've never heard of anything this big." A 400-metre slab of ice and rock fell off the the north face of the 5,067-metre high peak and tumbled down. "The debris dropped about 2,100 metres down to the glacier, and then it travelled across that glacier a distance of about a kilometre and a half. And then it went up over a 300-metre high ridge, and some of the debris went down over the other side of that ridge and onto the Hodgson glaciers." They are still investigating what may have caused the landslide, but it may be thinning glacier ice, possibly linked to climate change. "They may start happening more frequently. We'll just have to keep monitoring them and keeping tabs and see if we can see any trends." Popular with climbers, it was simply fortunate no one was in the area at the time of the landslide.

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58 dead in Indonesia floods, landslides

Indonesia

Map showing the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, where search and rescue workers struggled in bad weatherto reach survivors in flooded and landslide-hit Central Sulawesi, as the death toll from the disaster rose to 58.
(AFP/Graphic)

Indonesian search and rescue workers struggled in bad weather Tuesday to reach survivors in flooded and landslide-hit Central Sulawesi, as the death toll from the disaster rose to 58.

The floods have affected some 36,000 people and are the latest in a string of natural catastrophes to hit Indonesia, where activists have long warned that logging and a failure to reforest denuded land will lead to repeat tragedies.

The head of the Central Sulawesi disaster control task force, Frits Abbas, said that 58 people had been killed, but the bodies of most victims were still buried under debris.

Days of heavy rains sparked floods that inundated Central Sulawesi's Morowali district on Sunday, demolishing hundreds of homes and severing transport links.

On Tuesday, two-metre (-yard) high waters also swept through Banggai district to the east, said Rustam Pakaya, from the health ministry's crisis centre in the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

The floods have affected some 20,000 people in 16 villages there, he said, while the homes of some 16,000 others in Morowali were inundated.

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Torrential Rains,Landslides Inundate Indonesian Islands

Breaking Earth News
Indonesia

FLASH floods and landslides in central Indonesia have killed at least 30 people, and the death toll looks set to rise, Associated Press (AP) has reported.A senior health official confirmed the toll, and predicted the number of deaths would rise as rescuers reach remote areas in the disaster zone. Days of torrential rains have flooded dozens of villages on Sulawesi island, said Rustam Pakaya, head of the health ministry's crisis centre, AP reported."Rescuers have found at least 30 bodies,'' he said.According to AP, emergency supplies such as rice, instant noodles, blankets, and medicine are being distributed to thousands of people who have been forced to flee their homes.

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Dozens lose homes to landslide, more at risk

Vietnam
July 01, 2007
Over a dozen HCMC homes slid into a canal Friday as sand exploitation and overbuilding had weakened the unfortified bank. Officials recalled similar losses in the past and said several areas are still at risk. Fifty-four people lost their homes – 13 houses in all – along a 60m stretch of land on Thanh Da Canal off Xo Viet Nghe Tinh Street in Binh Thanh district’s ward 26 in Ho Chi Minh City. The accident site had been zoned for a new embankment to be built in the near future. A state office in charge of monitoring landslides in the area – which has been hit by five landslides that have killed two people since 2002 – fell into the canal with the slide. The city Department of Natural Resources and Environment attributed the accident to the rampant exploitation of sand along the canal bank and people building too many houses too close to the water. Two women slipped into the canal with the homes, but were able to grab hold of floating timber and were rescued. More houses could collapse when the tide recedes. All residents along the canal have been evacuated. Hundreds of areas around the city are still vulnerable due to sand exploitation, weak embankments, and encroaching developments. Last year, several similar incidents occurred in Nha Be district

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In Photos: Devastating Landslide in South China

South China

June 21, 2007

A Chinese farmer stands among the ruins of his house after a landslide in Zhenxiong, South China's Yunnan Province, June 20, 2007. Hundreds of families were evacuated to safe places after the landslide destroyed their houses on Monday, Xinhua news agency said. More Photos

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Flash floods, landslides hit SW China

CHENGDU, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Flash floods and landslides triggered by heavy rain since Saturday have left eight people dead,64 injured and more than three million people affected in and around Dazhou City, in southwest China's Sichuan Province, a local official said on Monday.

Photo: A man tries to climb to a floodgate to unlock the valve to sluice in Zijin County of south China's Guangdong Province on Saturday.

Landslides

Flash floods kill 22 in Pakistan

Flash flooding caused by torrential rain and thunderstorms struck several villages in mountainous north-western Pakistan, leaving at least 22 people dead

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