The next Holbeck Hall?

Thanks to Colin Walker for sending me some details about the Blue Anchor Pub, near Minehead in Somerset, which is threatened by the possibility of a landslide.
I revisited the Holbeck Hall Hotel with Year 7 this year, and it provoked quite a lot of interest.

There were also some problems for houses in The Marrams in Hemsby after houses had to be evacuated for fear that they may collapse into the sea as they are built into the sand dunes. There were problems for this area during 2013 after the storm surge, and several people have lost their homes while others are having to consider drastic action such as moving the whole house backwards with a crane. I've been collecting local news coverage of this event as there has been plenty in the East Anglian press.

Doing some searches reveals that the owner of the Blue Anchor pub has obviously been worried about the possibility for several years.

Image: Alan Parkinson

UPDATE
Paul Berry noticed this post, and as he lives a little more locally than I do, he paid it a visit, for purely professional reasons of course.
Read all about his exploration of the area, and the evidence for the further deterioration of the cliffs here on his excellent blog.

GA Conference 2013 - 4 of lots: Landslides

Following the previous post on hashtags, here's an example of what you can find if you search the hashtag #gaconf13

David Petley presented a session on landslides at the conference. I wasn't able to attend as it clashed with something I was involved with.
One of the features of the conference is the chance to listen to a range of experts in geographical themes, and David is certainly an expert on landslides.

David has kindly shared he presentation on Authorstream, and it can be found here...
This is a little like Slideshare, in terms of being a way to share presentations - all the presentations I used will be shared here in a forthcoming blog post...

Future trends in natural hazard losses

More PowerPoint presentations from David Petley

Most of the presentations will be made available on the GA's website over the coming weeks too.

Check the GA Conference page - I'll let you know when they start appearing...

Wet, wetter and wettest....

It's been a wet and windy few month, and the Christmas period saw some more heavy rainfall and flooding problems. I was grateful to have finished the year's travelling, and spent Christmas at home, going nowhere much for two weeks.

During that time, came the announcement that 2012, after a period of prolonged drought was the wettest since records began in England, and also in my region: the East of England.

The summer was also the wettest for over a century.
It seems the flooding also cost the UK around 13 billion pounds...

There were some good images online and via Twitter of various defences.

The landscape around my village is currently  more water than land in many places. There's a road leading to the nearby village of Beeston called Watery Lane which certainly lived up to its name when I last drove along it.
The result of the prolonged rainfall on saturated ground has been many flood warnings and hundreds of flooded properties, which stayed in place for weeks at a time.

Plenty of news coverage of the flooding

This is all useful for updating the High and Dry presentation which I will be talking about at various places in 2013.
There were plenty of flooding stories out there. Do you have one to share ? Do your students have one to share ?

Just before Christmas, there was yet more rainfall in the SW, with further flooding in Devon and Cornwall. People were evacuated from their homes, and some hand to spend Christmas away from their home, or had presents damaged.
What will 2013 bring in terms of weather extremes ?

One possible sign of the additional extremeness of the weather is that a bridge which  has stood for 1000 years was damaged this year.
There are also problems along the Jurassic coastline with saturated cliffs leading to warnings of landslides and safety fears for fossil hunters in the area.

Flooding and landslides in Rio

Image of Rocinha by Marie Hart

Dramatic pictures and devastation in Rio de Janeiro following heavy rains.

Geographers will appreciate the risk that weather like this brings to those people whose homes are built in marginal locations: steep slopes, land which was not suitable for other developments and land on river floodplains.

The BBC have been following the dramatic story, and this would also make a useful context for using Google Earth in the classroom to navigate to some of the locations featured in the articles and explore the slopes and the relationships between the buildings and the terrain.

UPDATE: The government is beginning to remove settlements which are built in dangerous locations and thousands of dwellers are facing forced evictions.