Landslide will bring it down

The Kilbuck landslide of Sept. 19 caused big problems for different folks.

Retail giant Wal-Mart's Supercenter is on hold. The Norfolk Southern Railway tracks are blocked. The 700-some inhabitants of Kilbuck have a hillside on their highway. And there are 22,000 drivers who motored along Route 65 to and from Pittsburgh who had to find an alternate byway for several days.

It's estimated that 500,000 cubic feet of dirt and boulders came down the hillside, enough to cover a football field about 75 feet deep, which some have suggested might be perfect for Heinz Field given the way the Steelers have played so far.

The good news is no one died and no one was hurt. And even though the developer and contractor of the site, and Kilbuck Township that gave the grading permit, and the state Department of Environmental Protection that gave approval based on Kilbuck's permit and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation which approved the project are involved in the clean-up, there's a reasonable hope the mess can be cleaned up.

Mud in your eye

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If you took the Kilbuck landslide and repeated it every day for four months, you'd have a rough idea of what folks near the town of Porong on Indonesia's Java island have been going through.

According to the Associated Press, hot mud from deep beneath the seismically challenged island began surging from a natural gas exploration site following a drilling accident. Every day, 165,000 cubic yards of mud have flowed, sometimes in exploding geysers, leaving 665 acres unlivable under thick smelly mud and forcing 10,000 people to flee.

The mud is not toxic, but it's 16 feet deep in places. It has closed a major road for weeks at a time and is threatening a rail line in the industrial area outside of Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city.

Scientists say the mud is from a reservoir deep beneath the surface that's been pressurized by shifts in the crust or by an accumulation of hydrocarbon gases.

Not only is the so-called mud volcano one of the largest ever recorded, geologists say the mud flow could continue for years, even centuries. Or, they say, it could stop today.

That kind prognostication makes TV weather forecasters look downright prescient.

Generation landslide

Landslides are generally triggered by earthquakes, volcanoes or weather events. The two largest ones this century occurred at Mount St. Helens, Wash. in 1980 and at Usoy, Tajikistan, in 1911.

At Mount St. Helens, the U.S. Geological Survey says a moderate earthquake caused about 1.7 cubic miles of rocks and mud to slide down the side of the volcano, releasing pent-up pressure that produced a major eruption on May 18.

An earthquake also triggered the Usoy landslide, which moved 1.5 cubic miles of material, building a dam 1,880 feet high on the Murgob River. The lake it formed is 40 miles long.

The deadliest landslide in history caused upwards of 50,000 deaths in western Iran in 1990. It, too, was caused by an earthquake.

I feel the earth move

The USGS estimates that landslides in this country annually cause more than $1 billion in damage and from 25 to 50 deaths. Globally, damages estimates are in the hundreds of billions of dollars along with thousands of deaths.

There were 26 major catastrophic landslides in the past century, according to the USGS. Of those, four occurred in China and Japan, and three occurred in the former Soviet Union, Peru and the U.S.

Besides Mount St. Helens, the American incidents were in Alaska in 1964 and Utah in 1983.

Caught in a landslide

Even if you never wondered how one of the three rivers ended up with the name of Monongahela, TMF will tell you. Native American tribes were aware of the unstable nature of the local landscape. They called the river Menaungehilla, which means "river with the sliding banks," or "high banks that break off and fall down."

USGS landslide inventory maps show that Washington County is the state's largest landslide area. But parts of Allegheny, Greene, Westmoreland and Fayette counties also are more prone to landslides than any other part of the state.

To prove that, the federal geological survey has documented more than 15,000 ancient and geologically recent major landslides in Allegheny and Washington counties, and more than 2,100 in one small section of Greene County.

Neither Kilbuck nor Wal-Mart figure prominently.