Jump to content

land slide in Hunza


glassgowkiss

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 17
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

because it occurred during winter and access is difficult?

 

The 2005 Kashmir earthquake (~80k casualties) struck just before winter set in and many people spent the winter without housing and with little supplies.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The website Rat posted is real interesting shit

 

http://hunzalandslide.blogspot.com/

 

BIG landslide damned river. BIG lake has now formed behind the dam. A hastily excavated spillway was dug. Today is the day that the newly formed lake rises high enough to drain down the spillway. As it drains it's going to dig the spillway deeper. The question is will it be a steady and somewhat controlled process or will there be a catastrophic blowout.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

in case you haven't been following the blog, the landslide dam is now being eroded rather fast and the dam will fail soon, maybe within the next couple days. The flow is being slowed down by a big boulder that luckily was in the right place. But it will be undercut eventually and then would be unable to hold back the lake. The lake behind it has grown enough to have flooded at least two towns. The lake is HUGE. It must be at least 22 km or 13 miles. The dam is 24 feet tall.

 

satelite image of lake

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_a2JvElU8gh4/TAilV5h9OrI/AAAAAAAADDE/Y2gy_ppVfGY/s1600/10_06+ASTER+Attabad+1st+June+corrected.JPG

 

I tried to figure out the volume of water in the lake from the estimates of inflow but they seem too big, somewhere around 1.5 billions gallons of water per DAY. And it has been building for over 5 months. (I would assume that the flow rate was much less in the winter but it has a large inflow for the last 2 months at least) I can't even comprehend the amount of gallons in that lake or what would happen when it is allowed to go downhill.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Same thing happened to Pemberton twice when landslides occurred on Meager... and blocked the Lillooet river.

 

at the risk of thread-drift, when did these events occur, drew? up by Salal Ck?

 

cheers,

 

First off the main Plinth lava flow that created Keyhole Falls, and dates to 2350 BP (before present)

 

Second of all the Capricorn Creek and Devastator (No Good Creek) drainages have both produced slides resulting in blockages of Meager Creek and generating flood waves down the Lillooet. None of the historic ones have reached Pemberton townsite as significant floods, most fizzled out at Pemberton Meadows. The Neal Carter party that made FAs of these peaks in the 30s were able to travel up the floodplain of the Lillooet to the Meager Group in style partly because it had been scoured by such a wave a few years earlier. Prehistoric evidence (sediment cores from Lillooet Lake) indicate that these flood waves recur every few hundred years at a size large enough to reach Pemberton townsite. We're overdue for a new one, BTW.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's what it must look like when the Big Slide south of Lillooet moves.

 

how far south?

 

the one across from Texas Creek that is such a bitch to drive through on Highway 12...

 

prehistorically, the entire Fraser has been blocked here twice by landslides, one about 8000 yrs BP and a smaller one about 1000 yrs BP. The big one made a debris dam 70m high, the smaller one was about 25m high. Both caused massive failures of the Fraser salmon run that took hundreds of years to recover, and archeological evidence shows that the more recent one caused a complete abandonment of the Lilloot townsite for a few hundred years by the 1st nations- they burned their houses and moved away until the salmon runs came back.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

not trying to belittle the trouble they are in, but I saw a video from their local news stations in which the towns people were tearing down the building before the water took them over. This is a question for someone who has experience with life in that kind of high country. What would be the reason for doing that? It didn't look like the building blocks could be used for another building on higher ground. If they left it standing, would the water do something to the blocks?

 

There is also another landslide dam forming on another fork of the same valley. If it broke, the inrush of water could overwelm the current attabad landslide dam making an even bigger mess.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.




×
×
  • Create New...