Tag: Atami
Atami 2021: “The Mudslide Ruins Were the Largest I’ve Ever Witnessed”
You don’t expect your life to end suddenly on a rainy Saturday morning, puttering around at home. To have earth and water and debris careen down a slope and slam into, through your home. You barely have time to realize what’s happening. And then it’s over.
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High up in the hills above Atami, rainwater finished infiltrating the nearly 56,000 cubic meters of soil and debris that had been packed into the head of the valley. Unable to drain, the water instead saturated the fill, putting intense pressure on unconsolidated particles and causing the mass to lose its cohesion, a condition called static liquefaction.
No longer strong enough to win its battle against gravity, the mass abruptly slid downslope, into the stream channel. Beginning as a normal landslide, it rapidly transitioned into a channelized debris flow within the confining walls of the valley. It incorporated river water, trees, rocks, soil, and previous landslide deposits into itself, churning everything together into a dense, massive wall of destruction. Nothing could stop or slow it as it bore down upon Atami. And wherever it passed, devastation followed. (more…)
The July 2021 Atami, Japan Landslide: “A Man-Made Calamity”
“This is hell,” a survivor said after a steep slope failed in the idyllic resort town of Atami, Japan, sending a torrent of mud careening into houses and people. Ten are dead, seventeen still missing as of this writing.
Landslides are a grim fact of life in many areas with steep topography. Gravity works. Things get loose and come down. Travel into the mountains basically anywhere, and you’ll see the evidence: streaks of bare earth where trees have been swept away, cascades of boulders marking areas where rock failed under the influence of weathering and physics. Sometimes earthquakes shake things until they topple. It seems like the most natural thing in the world.
But not this time. Nothing about this tragedy was natural.