What On Earth28:10How rain buckets with ‘brains’ help warn against landslides
On the night of Aug. 6, 2010, a large chunk of Mount Meager in southwestern British Columbia sheared off its face and fell to the valley below in the largest landslide in Canadian history.
No one was killed, partly because the area north of Whistler is so remote. But roads and property were destroyed.
“It’s just so incredible that an event so large didn’t end up with any fatalities. This is truly a catastrophic scale of event,” said Glyn Williams-Jones, an earth sciences professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.
As co-director of the Centre for Natural Hazards Research, Williams-Jones is one of the minds behind the installation of a new network of ultrasensitive microphones in Pemberton, B.C., near Mount Meager, that could give early warnings by detecting “the fingerprint of a landslide.”
“If we need time to respond, we need to be hearing, seeing measuring those events as fast as possible,” he told What On Earth host Laura Lynch.
Some of these new early warning systems might look unusual at first glance — from the microphones to rainwater buckets hooked up to analytics software. Experts say giving people hours, or even a few minutes, of early warning has grown in importance, as climate change makes natural disasters more common and dangerous than ever before.
The Mount Meager project, headed by the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District, plans to install small earthquake sensors and microphones that can pick up low-frequency sounds, known as infrasound, that the human ear cannot detect.
“We’re hoping in the next three to four years, as this project rolls out, that we could have as much as many tens of minutes of warning,” Williams-Jones said.
“Now, that doesn’t sound like a lot. But if we think about the early warning for an earthquake, we’re happy if we’ve got a few minutes of warning. It’s enough for people to start to respond.”
While the area immediately surrounding Mount Meager is remote, debris could flow down the river valley to nearby Pemberton, which is popular with hikers and tourists — not to mention the location of a hydroelectric facility.
“So we’re looking at thousands of people that are potentially impacted,” Williams-Jones said.
Climate change has made volatile weather patterns, such as landslides and atmospheric rivers — the latter of which have become more common in Western Canada — more intense and less predictable, he said.
Global warning
Of course, climate change pressure is being felt globally — and implementing warning systems on a global level is a much more complex challenge.
According to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) latest state of the climate update, presented last month at the United Nations COP 29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, a 24-hour warning of an impending climate event can make a huge difference — but only about half the world’s countries have adequate warning systems.
“We need many actors in co-ordination at the national and local levels and the global levels,” the WMO’s secretary general, Celeste Saulo, told The Sunday Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay. Part of that action includes improving data collection to best inform the public before a disaster, as well as recovery and response after a disaster.
“We need countries to play that role here. And with our support, I expect that we will move forward in this ambitious [plan] of having everyone covered by an early warning system by 2027,” Saulo said.
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The bucket approach
That ambitious global plan can take many forms. In Sitka, a city in southeast Alaska, it begins with humble rainwater buckets.
Inside these special buckets are sensors that collect information for a website run by the Sitka Sound Science Center, which residents can use to view landslide risk.
The idea to monitor rainfall traces back to August 2015, when heavy rainfalls preceded more than 40 landslides in the Sitka area, killing three people.
Scientists found that the strongest sign a landslide was likely to come was the amount of rain that fell three hours before.
“A group of people got together in the Science Center … in collaboration with some other universities, to try to study, you know, historically when landslides occur here, what type of weather patterns are they associated with?” said Arleigh Reynolds, executive director of the Sitka Sound Science Center.
Community collaboration is paramount
Ron Heintz, senior researcher with the centre, said early research hit some speed bumps when scientists made assumptions before listening to the community, including the Sitka Tribe of Alaska.
“Sitka is a coastal community and has a tsunami warning system, and they thought, well heck, we’ll just use that. And they were quickly disabused of that notion,” he said.
Tammy Young, part of the tribe’s resource protection department, pointed out that depending on where you live in the area, you might not be able to hear tsunami sirens while inside your home.
And even if you did, playing the same sound for tsunami and landslide warnings could be dangerous: If a tsunami was coming, you would flee to high ground, whereas if a landslide started, you’d have to do the exact opposite.
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“It instils a lot of pride that we are still in a position where we can help to be stewards of the land. It’s a very important tenet of being a tribal person,” Young said.
Another wrinkle scientists learned from the community is that while people living there wanted as much information as possible, they were less enthused about mandatory evacuation orders.
“People wanted this ability to kind of make a decision for themselves. It’s a very Alaskan thing to do,” Reynolds said.
Community collaboration was equally important in Pemberton, as Williams-Jones’s project enjoys support from local groups, including the Lil’wat Nation.
“This early warning system is vital for the monitoring of ongoing natural actions that continue in the upper valley. We only have to remember the Capricorn slide to realize the extent and potential of similar occurrences,” Lil’wat Nation Chief Dean Nelson said in a news release. (The Capricorn slide is another name for the Mount Meager landslide, as debris ran down the Capricorn Creek.)
“Realistically, from a management perspective, if the community feels really involved in the process, then if there ever is a really major dangerous event, then those community members know what’s going on,” Williams-Jones said.
“There’s a trust, there’s relationships that are developed, and that is absolutely critical to any kind of success.”