Last week, in the forum, I explained that Peru had a really rough year last year because of El Niño. Well, all the flooding triggered huge landslides. The Guardian says, because of that incident, the United Nations said Peru needs to invest in multi-hazard warning systems. This was not the first landslide in Peru. I have provided a table of Peru's past landslides from USGS. [Click to Enlarge]
Last year's landslide was also not the last. On March 3,2018, the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency that will last 60 days. After a week of intense rain, there was a landslide in Peru's capital, Lima. 100 homes, a school and, a clinic were destroyed. XinhuaNet also reports that, "The Peruvian authorities have announced they will send a team of experts to the disaster area, in order to carry out technical evaluations about the behavior of the earth and tectonic movements." Below is a video shows aftermath of the landslide.
[Video found on the AGU100 blog but filmed by Fameco Films and Art]
It seems to me that Peru experiences a lot of floods and landslides due to intense rain in the first quarter of the year. But, I was not able to find much information on prevention or alerts other than the FEMA Training pdf from my earthquake blog.
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Thank you for your research this week and that video [AGU is a great resource...always]
ReplyDeleteHi Sol,
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting to learn of mass wasting in Peru and especially this very recent incident! The video shot by a drone gave a great aerial perspective and is a quick and efficient way for responders to do a quick survey of the damages in order to develop a response plan for rescue and recovery, demonstrating how valuable drones can be in emergencies. I was amazed at how extensive the damages were in this case! In your research, were you able to determine what type of mass wasting event this was? It looked like rock slumping to me, since there were large blocks of land that appeared to have disengaged from the hillside. However, instead of soft earth and materials, as I would have expected with slumping, those break-away sections looked like mostly rock to me, and yet the geology seemed dissimilar to a rockfall, in that I didn't notice any Talus at the base of the hill. It would be interesting to learn which type of mass wasting it represented. Great research on this and the video was excellent, giving a broad point-of-view of the extent of the damage.
-Linda Byrne