The 17 July 2024 landslide in Zigui County, China

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

A remarkable landslide video was shared widely yesterday on social media, showing a landslide that occurred on 17 July 2024 in Zigui County, China.

There is quite a good version of this video on Youtube:-

Whilst this video shows it briefly from a different angle:-

There is little in the western media about this failure, but Chinese language news sites have some details. The location is reported to be Jiajiadian Village, Guizhou Town, Zigui County, Hubei Province, on the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir. Reports indicate that the landslide has a volume of about 800,000 cubic metres.

The context for this landslide is a spell of very heavy rainfall that has been affecting a large area of China. To manage downstream flooding, the Three Gorges Dam has been used to store water, but in the last two days the gates have been opened to create new storage capacity ahead of the next round of rainfall. This raises the possibility that the landslide might have been associated with the twin effects of local soil saturation and drawdown of the lake. It is interesting to note that in the video, as shown in the still below, there appears to be some freeboard in the reservoir:-

The landslide itself is translational in nature, involving soil and weathered rock. At this time of year, this area is very cloudy, so satellite imagery is not yet available to allow me to pin down the precise location. Guizhou Town is at [30.9950, 110.6954].

It appears that there were no fatalities in this landslide, which is remarkable given its scale. But, China is not always transparent about losses in such events, so I would treat this with some caution.

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