Free Republic

The first director of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure will be leaving her job in the city for a role in President Joe Biden’s administration, Mayor Bill Peduto announced Friday. Karina Ricks, who took the reins of the newly created DOMI in February 2017, will join the Federal Transit Administration as associate administrator for research, innovation and demonstration. The Peduto administration said the department was formed to promote safety, accessibility and sustainable transit in the city. Under her leadership, DOMI developed a plan early on to improve safety on Liberty Avenue in the Strip District, which is set to...

Shimla: Massive mudslides hit the Chandigarh-Shimla national highway between Parwanoo and Solan towns in Himachal Pradesh on Saturday owing to heavy overnight rains, that led to traffic snarls and posed a serious threat to motorists. The movement of traffic was hampered almost throughout the day due to massive landslides along the highway in Solan district. Motorists said the maximum landslips were on a 30-km stretch between Parwanoo and Kumarhatti, where over 20 km was either damaged or piled with boulders and muck. They said the falling debris threatens their safety while travelling through this stretch that has been excavated recently...

Olympia, the Sanctuary of Zeus and venue of the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece, was probably destroyed by tsunamis that reached far inland, and not as previously believed, by earthquakes and river flooding... Paläotsunamis that have taken place over the last 11,000 years along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean. The Olympic-tsunami hypothesis has been put forward due to sediments found in the vicinity of Olympia, which were buried under an 8 metres thick layer of sand and other debris, and only rediscovered around 250 years ago. "The composition and thickness of the sediments we have found, do not fit...

A landslide last fall caused a giant wave not seen in Alaska since a storied 1958 event in Lituya Bay. After a period of heavy rains, a mountainside near Tyndall Glacier collapsed into a fiord of Icy Bay on Oct. 17, 2015. The displaced water generated a wave that sheared alders more than 500 feet up on a hillside across from the slide at the Southeast Alaska location. To put that in perspective, the 2011 tsunami in Japan reached about 130 feet above sea level. The Icy Bay wave may be the largest since a magnitude-8 earthquake shook much of...

Pokhara, the second largest town of Nepal, has been built on massive debris deposits, which are associated with strong medieval earthquakes. Three quakes, in 1100, 1255 and 1344, with magnitudes of around Mw 8 triggered large-scale collapses, mass wasting and initiated the redistribution of material by catastrophic debris flows on the mountain range. An international team of scientists led by the University of Potsdam has discovered that these flows of gravel, rocks and sand have poured over a distance of more than 60 kilometers from the high mountain peaks of the Annapurna massif downstream. Christoff Andermann from the GFZ German...

A rain-soaked hillside collapsed on the main highway connecting Washington and Oregon, stranding thousands of motorists for hours Thursday while rain continued to fall throughout the region. The storms that have been sending rivers out of their banks, closing roads and killing at least two people in the Pacific Northwest this week were easing a bit, but forecasters said mudslide danger on the saturated hills would remain high through the weekend. ...

At midnight on Sunday, August 8th, a temporary lake caused by a recent landslide broke loose above the town of Zhouqu, in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, China. The outflow slid down the valley as a wall of mud, wiping out houses and muli-story buildings, and killing at least 1,144 residents - with over 600 still reported as missing. More than 10,000 soldiers and rescuers arrived soon to comb through the mountains of mud that buried several parts of Zhouqu County.

Underwater landslides tallied near Puerto Rico Sid Perkins An oceanographic survey off the northern coast of Puerto Rico has found remnants of many past underwater landslides, a handful of which were large enough to have caused deadly tsunamis. Although most tsunamis are caused by earthquakes, a small percentage of the destructive waves are triggered by seafloor slumping (SN: 3/6/04, p. 152: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040306/bob8.asp). Sonar revealed the landslide remnants off Puerto Rico, says Uri S. ten Brink, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Mass. He and his colleagues report their findings in the June 16 Geophysical Research Letters....

In the wake of all that has happened and watching the events that unfold hourly, and keeping up with the Katrina live threads, I thought I would post a thread that could help all of us on FR and those visiting, lurkers etc... I know that we are an intelligent, creative, and ingenuous bunch, so I am tapping many of you and others to contribute your emergency preparedness plans, ideas, or homebrew solutions to emergency problems. Just to start off, here are a few things my family and I have decided during an emergency, be it natural disaster, civil insurrection,...

Explore one of the most dangerous and enigmatic forces on earth, tsunamis. See the science behind their devastating power. Understand where they come from and what we can do to better prepare. It's not if it will happen again, but when.

Hawaii, which Al Gore won by 20% in 2000, only votes GOP in Republican re-election landslides. Hawaii voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, in his re-election landslide, and for Richard Nixon in 1972 in his re-election landslide. These are historical facts. This must be especially disconcerting news for Democrats.

Source: University Of Southampton Date: 2004-08-19 Canary Islands Landslides And Mega-Tsunamis: Should We Really Be Frightened? What is the reality behind stories of mega-tsunamis wiping out the American east coast and southern England? Very little, according to Dr Russell Wynn and Dr Doug Masson from Southampton Oceanography Centre, who have been studying Canary Islands landslides for many years. Their research has shown that stories of a devastating 'mega-tsunami' some 300 feet high and travelling at 500 mph are greatly exaggerated, and that reports suggesting tens of millions of people could be killed have little basis in reality. Dr Russell Wynn...

Headwaters Logging Leads to Mudslides SCOTIA, California, January 9, 2003 (ENS) - Mudslides caused by logging activities are burying ancient redwood trees and salmon streams in California, environmentalists charge. Redwoods along California's Avenue of the Giants are being buried alive in sediment torrents originating in Pacific Lumber's logging sites in northern California, warn the Humboldt Watershed Council and the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters. Neighbors of the controversial timber sales are reported to be working to save their houses, vehicles and other possessions from the storm related torrents that originate in hillsides laid bare by logging. "This is a...

<p>Another powerful storm is expected to hit Northern California on Thursday, the National Weather Service forecasts.</p> <p>The upcoming storm will produce strong winds and significant rains and mountain snow.</p> <p>Winds are forecast to increase along the coastal range late Wednesday night. Winds will continue to increase over the interior Thursday as the storm moves inland.</p>

<p>State Attorney General Earl Anzai said the only way to protect the state from future claims such as the one upheld in the 1999 Sacred Falls landslide may be to pass a law exempting the state from liability.</p> <p>"I suspect that we'll have to go to the Legislature and get relief to be sure that the state doesn't get sued every time someone gets hurt, and not only in wild areas," he said last week.</p>