Early Warning of Water-Triggered Landslides

Indian Geotechnical Conference 2019: Geotechnics for INfrastructure Development & UrbaniSation (GeoINDUS)

Kala Venkata Uday., Varun Dutt, Praveen Kumar, Vikas Thakur, Emir Ahmet Oguz., Ivan Depina, Pratik Chaturvedi, Ankush Pathania, & Katherin Robbinson

2021-03-19

Landslides are a major societal threat, causing adverse consequences to life, economy and environment. Mitigation of the potential negative effects of landslides commonly involves deployment of challenging and costly measures. This is often the case in the development and operation of linear infrastructures such as road, pipeline and railway networks in landslide-prone areas. One of the commonly employed measures for mitigating the adverse consequences involves monitoring of landslide triggering parameters and issuing timely warnings. Given that the landslide triggering parameters (e.g. large weather systems, local man-made triggers) and the linear infrastructures span varying spatial scales, there is a need for developing a landslide monitoring and early warning system for both regional and local scales. This paper presents a brief introduction of the Norwegian practice for early warning of landslides triggered by extreme weather on regional scale, which has proven to be effective. The criteria for issuing an early warning are based on the degree of saturation of soil and the supply of water to it through rainfall and snow melting. On other hand, monitoring of single slopes on local scales can be quite challenging and expensive. In order to provide landslide monitoring systems of single slopes in affordable price, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi developed a low-cost landslide monitoring and early warning system. These systems are deployed in Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh, India, and monitoring fifteen plus landslide locations. A recent case study is also discussed in this paper where these systems helped in alerting people and traffic from an impending landslide.