wo days ago a landslide occurred in Quebec - the CBC coverage is HERE. Can you spot the house at the bottom? It is next to the tree at the bottom. It is a 300 metres across. A loud noise alerted the residents who fled.
I associate a landslide with a slope, but it is hard to see a slope in the pictures. Rain was the cause for this landslide where slate exists. You can see the grey in the picture. A factor in Quebec is the clay soil which can retain a lot of water.
The warning signs? Big cracks in the ground, bulging ground appears at the base of a slope, changes in landscape such as water drainage on slopes, land movement, progressively leaning trees. What about this? Doors or windows stick or jam for the first time.
What are you supposed to do with this much land missing? I haven't found any answers beyond call your insurance provider and similar activities. What do you do? Maybe put a thousand metre fence around the "big hole". There are provincial and federal initiatives to stabilize slopes and support revegetation.
Landslides occur all over the planet. The worst landslide in terms of recorded devastation was the Frank Slide in 1903 in Canada. It buried the town of Frank, Alberta under an 92-million tonne rock avalanche. There were 75 deaths in that landslide.
In Haiyuan, China in 1920, landslides resulted in 200,000 deaths. There were 50,000 landslides at the epicentre of the Gansu earthquake, with 675 big landslides that spread throughout the province. There were aftershocks that lasted three years because of the widespread breaking of the ground. And the death toll of 200,000 lives is an estimate because it happened during the Chinese Civil War.
I wonder what that our Quebec farmer is going to do with the new big hole in the ground.
I checked out the Wisteria in Jordan on Monday but it didn't have the floral display worth photographing. This year with the warm/cold variations, the leaves have started to come out while the wisteria is blooming, interrupting the pure purple blossom display.
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