The mayor of a hilltop town on Sicily said “the situation is dire” after a powerful storm brought down a long section of hillside, leaving houses perched perilously on a cliff edge.
About 1,500 people have so far been evacuated from their homes because of the landslide, which began to show signs of movement on Sunday before developing a 4km-long front. The chasm continues to widen, raising fears it could swallow the town’s historic centre.
“This is a dramatic landslide,” Massimiliano Conti, the mayor of Niscemi, a town in the south of the island, said in a video on social media, while urging people living beyond the cordoned-off areas to “stay home”.
“I don’t want anyone to take this event lightly,” he added. “Fortunately there were no injuries, only damage to homes.”
A geologist pointed-out a similar landform, in the US, where homes at the bottom had been wiped-out…
They pointed-out that IF you see the cliff is just raw earth, no plants or anything on it,
THEN that means it tears-off, falls, however you want to call it, periodically.
& YOU DO NOT BUILD NEAR THE BOTTOM OR THE TOP OF THAT, because it isn’t going to cease doing landslides just because you’ve put a home there.
Looking at that pic, above, it’s absolutely inevitable that that cliff would take-down some of the stuff on top: it’d be only a matter of time.
& it will keep doing that, at intervals.
All such locations shouldn’t even be buildable or insurable.
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