The Cellar - July 26, 2009: Nachterstedt Landslide

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- - July 26, 2009: Nachterstedt Landslide (http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=20741)

July 26, 2009: Nachterstedt Landslide

StereoMike sent me a link to pictures of this tragic landslide in Germany.

In 1994 they turned a huge open pit mine into a lake, and a few days ago a section of land, about 400 by 1200 feet, slid into the lake without warning, at about 5 in the morning. Three people were sleeping in a semi-detached house that went with the slide and are presumed buried.

http://cellar.org/2009/slide.jpg

http://cellar.org/2009/slide2.jpg

One picture I saw looked like there was a lake on the other side of this village also, but I'm not sure of that.

link

You can see the area on Google Maps here, and there's an entry in the German Wikipedia here.
Don't search for "Concordiasee" on Google Maps, that'll take you to a different lake, elsewhere in Germany.

holy smokes is right!

Welcome to the Cellar, Zarquod. :D Thanks for the information.

If you go to Zarquod's link for the German Wikipedia, and click on Koordinaten numbers in the upper right hand corner, it'll take you to a GeoHack page with tons of maps of this lake and the surrounding area.

What kind of mines were those (there's a much smaller pit mine.lake on the other side of the little village)?

"... a semi detached house ..."

I think its fully detached now.

That is a huge engineering failure. Someone is going to be in TROUBLE about this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZenGum (Post 584308)

That is a huge engineering failure. Someone is going to be in TROUBLE about this.

I could be wrong, but at first glance it looks like it's located in former East Germany, and the houses appear to be old enough to be from that era. If that's the case, then who are they going to go after? It's a different country now.

Edit: A Babelfish translation of the Wikipedia entry says the houses are from the 30's.

Quote:

The slipped location was part of an open mining dump from the time 1926 ago, which was released into the 1930er years for land development with homes of one's own. [3] It is assumed that unverfüllte distances from the second half 19. Century, when the coal was won still in the foundation engineering, causes of the landslide to be could. [4] [5] as a cause more probably is however a setting flowing. 1950 and 1959 had already occurred in the open mining by setting flowing caused landslides, whereby 1959 a worker died. [6] The legal successor of the former operator company, the Federal LMBV, promised unbureaucratic assistance to the concerning and furnished in the local administration a care office.

Looks like there's a legal successor of the former mine. And they are on the hook for this.

The drop-off from houses to lake level is about 150 feet.