Mass Wasting

Is That Tree Getting Closer?

While natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions and high magnitude earthquakes occur less frequently in Italy, landslides bring destruction year round.
All four types of down slope movement (falling, sliding, flowing, complex) are present. Heavy rains are one of the most common causes of landslides here. In 2009, debris flow and flooding was caused by a downpour in Messina, Sicily covering many areas with mud, water, and debris, and killing about 31 people. Some people were trapped in their cars while others were swept out to sea. In the north, near the Alps, rockfalls cause trails to be blocked and lakes to be formed by the damming of streams. A different type of flowing in the form of avalanches is also common in this region. In other places with hills and/or volcanoes, sliding is the type of mass wasting you'll see. Deforestation, illegal building developments, and poor land-management policies have also caused significant erosion in Italy's mountainous regions.

Rock slides have also contributed to a few tsunamis. A landslide in 1963 caused a tsunami in a lake created by the Vajont Dam in northeastern Italy. The waters went over the dam and into surrounding towns killing around 2000 people. On ground and submarine landslides cause tsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea as well.

Prevention Projects

The European Commission has co-funded a project to mitigate the hazards of landslides. It is designated "Project Landslide" and it is the Landslide Risk Assessment Model for Disaster Prevention and Mitigation. Landslides have occurred more frequently in Europe due to heavy rains and climate change so the project's objective was to accurate map and assess the risks related to landslide occurrence. To achieve this, models would map out the daily risk for surface landslides caused by rainfalls and develop an automatic software that timely transmits data to civil protection departments. With this project, people are hoping to transfer and apply this model in other territories affected by landslides and that future experiments will expand the functions to model other natural risks.

In a more regional project, Italy's National Group for Hydro-Geological Disaster Prevention is trying to implement satellite radar to detect small changes in the ground that are undetectable to the naked eye. It is known that ground shifts usually precede major landslides. So in this project called the Service for Landslide Monitoring (SLAM), satellite's radar interferometry is used, mathematically combining multiple radar images taken. Any tiny changes in landscape are highlighted in the imagery.
These processes offer three services:

1. A large-scale landslide motion survey identifying areas affected
2. A reduced-scale landslide displacement monitoring to measure ground deformation over particular sites of interest
3. Landslide susceptibility mapping which merges previous data products with thematic maps of land use, slope, geomorphology and other relevant information to provide geological hazard maps

With different projects in place, people can hope to reduce the amount of damage and casualties. It also helps for people to remember that an area affected by a landslide will always be affected by landslides.

Satellite Imagery Project
Project Landslide
Landslides In Europe
Messina Mudslide