Network Rail Blame Landslips On Climate Change (Again)
By Paul Homewood
Thanks to WUWT for this research:
A railway director said the train system is "suffering the challenges of climate change" following a landslip in Kent.
Network Rail, which found a 40m (131ft) long crack, said material had slipped about 5m (16ft) down an embankment at Newington on Friday.
Network Rail’s Kent route infrastructure director Bob Coulson said more than £470m had been spent on earthworks.
The line is due to reopen on Monday.
Mr Coulson said the amount of money spent "shows the size of the challenge we’re facing".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-68435639
Maybe Coulson might like to explain what caused landslides in Kent pre-climate change:
Exceptional images have re-emerged of one of Kent’s biggest landslips, highlighting the essential work by Network Rail to maintain coast-side railway lines.
Original photographs of The Great Fall, a severe landslip at Folkestone Warren in December 1915, show train derailments and continued rail movement following the incident.
The railway line to Dover moved 50 metres towards the coastline and 1.5 million cubic metres of chalk fell into the sea following weeks of heavy rain.
The line remained closed until 11 August 1919, the First World War having delayed its reopening.
Derek Butcher, a route asset manager at Network Rail, found the historic images in a filing cabinet while moving offices.
He said: “All landslides are activated by rainfall… [that location] has quite complex geology formed of chalk overlying clay. The water from the rainfall percolates through the chalk and sits on top of the clay and saturates it, and leads to landslips. The chalk can’t sit in a stable manner on the clay when it’s that wet.”
The kink in the line remains visible today, underscoring the severity of the incident.
Derek said: “We believe the train pictured was alerted to the landslip by the signal box at Folkestone Junction and was slowed down and found itself part on and part off the landslip. They were able to evacuate passengers who walked through the tunnel to Folkestone Junction station.
“There was a significant amount of movement following the train stopping… That’s why it looks so horrific.”
Landslips have been a major feature of the line since it opened in 1844. In 1877, two people died when part of the Martello Tunnel was destroyed. The line remained closed for three months afterwards.
The last major movement was recorded in 1939 but Derek said some ground movement had forced Network Rail to implement speed restrictions on the line in recent years. The need to take such precautions typically follows a very wet winter.
Landslides can occur anywhere and when they impact on railways, roads and other infrastructure, they can cause a lot of disruption.
As the earth becomes heavier, the water forces apart grains of soil so that they no longer lock together – resulting in a landslip as the structure becomes loose and unstable.
Derek said: “The landslip [at Folkestone Warren] is still active… There are a number of ways that movement is controlled. Firstly, we monitor the location extensively with settlement points on a monthly basis.”
We also use light-detecting and ranging (LIDAR) technology, a laser scanning technique to record points on the landscape. The data helps us keep track of which locations are moving.
Other techniques include boring holes in the ground to drain water, and building walls and other structures designed to stop the landslip from moving.
Meanwhile, Derek and his team regularly walk over locations at risk, comparing photographs to see whether the ground has moved.
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/stories/the-great-fall-historic-landslip-images-resurface/
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Climate change is the automatic excuse for all sorts of managerial failures these days. A get out of jail free card
Aye, you pretty well hit that one smack on the scone. Management ? Huh, HR Placements ( not on Merit ).
can it get more stupid. So now you have it anything out of everyday is now climate change.
Carbon dioxide is the root of all evil. Anybody caught exhaling it will be penalized to the full extent of the law.
Yes, I think all the climate zeolots should all be advised to stop breathing to avoid exhaling the “pollutant” carbon dioxide.
And as an aside I recently saw a newspaper article where someone said that they’d stopped eating bananas to help the environment, because they caused flatulance and increased her emissions of greenhouse gasses.
Does she know what happens to the banana if she doesn’t eat it?
Why did he cite climate change when he had a long historical excuse? Ignorance?
Climate change is to blame for everything
In a bbc account of an orca killing a great white shark there is the following
‘The scientists do not know what is driving the behaviour, but Dr Towner told BBC News that it was becoming evident that “human activities, like climate change and industrial fishing, are exerting significant pressures on our oceans”.
I wonder why the other name for orcas is killer whales. Could it be…err… they like killing things?
It is obvious that all the land slips experienced in the late 1900’s and early 2000’s must therefore have been down to either shoddy construction or pesky land slip gremlins who attacked the many rail lines dotted around the Nations. Could it just be that maintenance work, done on the cheap both in terms of price and time contributed to an age old problem – when land gets super saturated, which is caused by lots of rain falling, it tends to react badly to weight being placed on it and moves. I will not call the chap an idiot, that would be unfair to idiots, maybe deluded.
This fearful “climate” landslip looks like now’t but a babby.
look up Hatfield, Doncaster deep rotational slip of 11 February 2013. The track lifted over 2 metres and it took 6 months and many millions of pounds before the train line was re-opened.
A ‘bumpy’ ride had been reported a couple of days earlier. Fortunately, the early morning train driver had his wits about him and stopped the train with no injuries.
Interestingly, of the parties responsible for this disaster, the one chosen to “pick up the tab” was Network Rail, who, in this instance, were blameless. However, all the other parties, including the actual guilty party were private firms whose management had good connections. So, the taxpayer effectively ended up paying all costs.
Typical. Absolutely nothing whatever to do with climate or even weather, although as the failure was basically of one face of Hatfield Colliery’s spoil heap, no doubt the verdict today would be different.
Another landslip caused by the WEATHER.
No, not weather. Arrogant technical incompetence, which the responsible Regulators chose to ignore.
Language question:
Landslip is not a word used in America. Article has ‘landslip’ a dozen times, and ‘landslide’ 3 times. Is ‘landslip’ English English for ‘landslide?’
IMO usual Eng Eng is landslide
Landslide is usually caused by inadequately compacted sand / gravel material on an oversteep slope literally sliding downwards.
Another failure type is where a rotational slip occurs, with a roughly circular failure in cross section, usually showing pronounced lift of strata at the toe of the tip.
Mainly in clay strata.
I used to be able to design such things but have chucked away my Geotechnics textbooks. Probably available online. Search for slope failure analysis.
Without actually knowing, I would guess a land slide is surface material sliding and carrying more material as it goes, I would guess a landslip is a lubricated layer down deeper letting a land mass slide and move the whole landmass. I think there might be cases with some of both at the same time.
If any have better explanations, I am interested.
The government are convinced of man made climate change. They believe that, through net zero, they can control the climate. The Net Zero mantra requires a reduction in car use. That depends on public transport being available.
So, while the Government are convinced of man made climate change, the railways are safe. If you work for Network Rail, and you want to keep your job but disagree with the above, you keep your mouth shut!
The government are convinced they can exploit the climate change hoax to get the people to accept the destruction of the middle-class.
They believe that, through net zero, and an invasion of 3rd-worlders, they can destroy the middle-class’ wealth.
The government are not competent to understand ‘climate change,’ but they are competent to use it as a political tool.
Don’t think you understand the 15 minute gulag concept.
You will own nothing, go nowhere and be happy, or else.
Climate has always been changing, there are frequent changes between dry climate years and wet climate years, when anyone claims climate change, of course it changed. They mean to imply man-made CO2 climate change has caused harm that is no different from harm that occurred before man-made CO2 was present
What the heck is a “climate year?”
It is said that the average weather over 30 or so years is climate. Inside that 30 or so years there are years of warmer or colder, dryer or wetter, there are differences inside any thirty year period that is likely more different than the average between two 30 year periods. I would lump similar consecutive years together and call the changes as normal, natural, self-correcting, alternating, climate change. Climate has been hotter and colder than now, sea level has been higher and lower than now, changes have happened faster and slower than now, we live in a ten thousand year paradise that has had changes bounded in tighter bounds than during any time in history that we have data for comparisons. Some look and say we are going to get as hot or hotter than the warmest, others say we are going to get as cold or colder than the coldest, some say the sea level will get as high as the highest, and on and on. We have had much more narrow bounds on extremes for ten thousand years, why, what caused this wonderful change? Over the past million years or more, ice ages increased with warmer and warmer warm times followed by colder and longer ice ages. During each warm time, more and more ice was deposited on Antarctica using evaporation and snowfall on land in cold places. Antarctica did not have enough thawing and returning of water to the oceans. Now, the ocean water that became ice on the northern continent is tied up in ice on land and without that being water in the oceans there cannot be enough evaporation and snowfall for another major ice age.
The latest ten thousand year climate cycles are the new normal and this will continue. It will continue to cycle warmer and colder in approximate thousand year cycles in the northern hemisphere and it will continue to cycle warmer and colder in cycles that are shorter and more tightly bounded in the southern hemisphere.
Alex Pope
This 2018 paper by Network Rail and Arup explains it well. Most embankments were tipped by hand by Victorian ‘navvies’ with material dug by hand from the nearest cutting. When Brassey first started working in France he had to bring his own men over because the diet of the average French peasant was so lacking in protein that they weren’t physically up to the work of a navvy. Slips and settlements are part of life for a railway engineer. There is a bit of the obligatory climate change BS and excessively gloomy modeling but it still concludes that maintenance is cheaper than prevention.
‘The costing model found that preventative engineering would be less cost-effective than maintenance and delay costs over both 20 year and 50 year lifespans.’
https://www.geplus.co.uk/technical-paper/technical-paper-railway-earthworks-with-particular-emphasis-on-the-behaviour-of-clay-embankments-in-the-south-east-15-01-2018/
Some years ago we did a job at Barnes Bridge station where settlement and track and platform alignment were recurring issues. Our geotechnics expert found an unusually high proportion of coal and coal waste in the fill and thought it likely that the embankment was on fire and had been for years. One of the exciting moments in our work on stations to get them up to a basic standard for handover at privatisation.
Going up to London on 11th from Faversham for lunch I noticed an unusual wobble quite early on. I imagine that it was reported and prompted a track inspection and the discovery of the slip on about 22nd/23rd.
Breaking news: The First World War was caused by climate change!
Difficult to understand how small changes in averages cause such things!
Popesclimatetheory
You aren’t far away with the “lubricated layer”, I suppose.
But the characteristics of the soil (or other material, including colliery spoil, back in the day), the characteristics of the underlying strata (often including clay layers), the slope angle and (vitally) the piezometric profile are the important factors.
The piezometry is, if you like, the saturated water level within the embankment and foundations. This affects not only the shear strength but also generates a mayor loading within the embankment that (together with the load of the soil / spoil itself), that the shear strength must be able to resist.
As a Chartered Civil Engineer who worked 40 years in the business of affordable and reliable energy, I also had personal responsibility to avoid another 1966 Aberfan incident!
Found this:
https://thecontentauthority.com/blog/landslip-vs-landslide
As M. Brumby says, there is a difference. Not that it appears the BBC and Network Rail writers know the difference.
I wonder how much the growth of trees on cuttings and embankments since the end of steam has affected water retention. While you might think the root systems would beneficial consider that people advocate planting trees to retain water and prevent flooding. Cutting down trees in the mountains for ski slopes has been blamed for flash floods as rain quickly hits the streams and rivers – in other words, grassy slopes clear water quickly. I wonder if anyone has studied this?
Much easier to blame the invisible climate god than your own incompetence or lack of maintenance. It is the all embracing catchall excuse for incompetence and lack of performance.
I would be very interested to see their inspection logs for that section together with information regarding the slope angles and when the slopes were created.