Devastating landslide swallows Brazilian port

According to the description on YouTube, a "backhoe was excavating for the construction of a ramp 150 m from the port and into the Rio Negro," causing a "strip of land of at least 300 meters long from the port to slide over the work." It happened in October.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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CastanhasDoPara

Ai ai, que a foda estÃ¡ acontecendo? Que a merda deve mim fazer? Foda, foda, foda…

Mother nature is PISSED.

BTW, I think 12 people died in this disaster.
shanealeslie

Halfway through I thought ‘Hmmm, it’d be cool to play that as a level in one of those sandbox type games. Survive the slide, maybe get bonuses for saving others’.
Teller

One of the best illustrations I’ve seen of the slippery slope argument.
murray

Freakin’ heck.

Pity it’s been sped up. Would like to see it at normal speed.

Seems more like a sinkhole than a landslide. Like the river undermined the land, or the land wasn’t really land but a man-made patio which collapsed. Not that I know anything.
alllie

Don’t they have engineers and geologists in Brazil?
- bob d
  
  Doesn’t matter how many geologist or engineers there are if you don’t consult any of them…
Anonymous

I would have thought Brazil’s exhaustive environmental regulations and stringent safety and building codes would have prevented such a disaster!
fnc

“…sought its angle of repose.”

That angle being zero, from the looks of things. What a mess.
Suburbancowboy

Needs Yakety Sax.
- dole
  
  I was the anon who originally posted a Yakety Sax YouTubeDoubler link before Antinous’ #14… it was working, I went back to check it later and they must’ve nuked it, because it was gone. I apologized, and Antinous may have nuked my original and apology, so that was the reason for his now somewhat non sequitur reply.
  
  I’m actually kinda glad it’s gone; I didn’t realize there was considerable death toll in this landslide, but… I guess, again, someone had to do it. The music did fit well, though…
  - Suburbancowboy
    
    Oh, I posted without knowing there was a death toll. I didn’t see your previous comments either.
    If I knew that people died in this event, I wouldn’t have written that. Not cool. Knowing that people died, my stupid 3 word comment comes off as very dickish.
Anonymous

I don’t think the ground was waterlogged. From AllVoices:

the work was intended to facilitate access to a floating pontoon, that served as a berth at the facility, after river levels dropped.
__
The river is at its lowest level since records began in 1902, following the Amazonâ€™s worst drought in decades. According to the governmentâ€™s geological service, the Rio Negro was measured at a depth of 13.63 metres, down from a high of nearly 30 metres last year.
- mdh
  
  But the elevation of the sea, into which the muddy earth slid, remains unaffected by your datum.
  - Anonymous
    
    “But the elevation of the sea, into which the muddy earth slid,…”
    
    Manaus, Brazil is about 1000Km from the sea.
millie fink

That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We’d never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

cf. Johan Grimonprez : dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
Major Variola (ret)

Geomorphology, like evolution, does not sleep.

We have not changed gravity, its your fault. –Keepers of the Constants
Nadreck

Avoiding this sort of thing is what Geological Engineers earn the big bucks for.
urbanhick

Whoa! We’re currently looking into gettting some backhow work done in our yard – I think I’ll make sure we’re more than 150m from any waterways. Seriously, though – I hope no-one was hurt when this happened. What a nightmare!
Anonymous

Omm nomm nomm nomm… said the river.
DeWynken

“Oops. My bad”
EH

That’s a paddlin’.
penguinchris

Incredible, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the camera work. You can just imagine the guy operating the camera thinking “OH CRAP OH CRAP WHAT DO I POINT THE CAMERA AT HOW ABOUT THIS NO HOW ABOUT THAT OH CRAP OH CRAP!” (in Portuguese of course).
GuyInMilwaukee

via Google translate:
“OH OH CRAP CRAP O QUE PONTO I DA CÃ‚MARA DE COMO SOBRE ESTE NÃƒO COMO QUEM QUE OH OH CRAP CRAP!”
I was imagining the same thing.
Phikus

Hoes. Is there anything they are not responsible for?
Anonymous

Our planet. I weep for it.
Anonymous

Camera is motion activated – you can see it triggering on passing birds.
hubs

BoingBoing loves disaster pr0n.
MrsBug

Wow, I wonder if that area they were excavating was built on fill?
- mdh
  
  I think that is exactly the case, the land under the pavement got saturated, and when it was released the soil sought its angle of repose.
MattF

It’s quite possible that this is non-Newtonian fluid mechanics in action. A solid (high-viscosity) is given a shock and becomes liquid (low-viscosity). The transition causes a second shock, that causes more of the solid to liquefy, and so on, and so on. My recollection is that this can happen particularly with clayey soils. The technical term for a fluid that becomes less viscous when shocked is ‘thixotropic’.
- technogeek
  
  MattF: Either that, or there was a large area of soft (soggy?) ground buttressed by a barely-stable wall of firmer earth, ready to go as soon as the dam broke…
  
  Slight topic hijack: Never break ground before finding out what you’re likely to run into. Neighbor’s contractor (whom nobody in this neighborhood will ever do business with again!) was blatently lazy and didn’t bother to phone DIG-SAFE before breaking ground — and broke a gas main. It could have been much worse.
Anonymous

While I’m sure this happened really quickly, It looks like this video has a bit of time lapse in it.
Anonymous

All of your base are belong to us.
Antinous / Moderator

Anon,

Weird, because it worked when it first went up.