From the newspapers today

Anthropogenic landslides.
"These are a cause of great concern, especially in areas of rapid growth in which cities are rapidly expanding. I fear that we will see a legacy of landslides in the urban areas of Asia over the next decade as a result of the incredible rate of urbanisation in Asia."
Dr David Petley, Univ of Durham UK

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An Excerpt from the Telegraph today

Water supply hit - Pipes snap after slide

OUR CORRESPONDENT

A queue to collect water from a tank in Gangtok on Sunday. Picture by Prabin Khaling Gangtok, March 8: Water supply to Gangtok and its surrounding areas has been affected since yesterday morning as six pipes coming from a stream, the only source for the town, snapped following a landslide the previous night. Since yesterday, the government has started ferrying water tanks on trucks to different areas of the town. Long queues of people were seen on the banks of the major streams. On Friday, the pipes broke apart and were buried under rocks about 100m from Ratheychu which is the only water source for the Sikkim capital and its adjoining areas. Around 36 million gallons of water from this source is supplied to Gangtok and its surrounding areas daily after it is treated at the Selep treatment plant, 10km from here. “All the six main pipes have been damaged in the landslide and are buried under huge rocks,” P.S. Basnett, the principal chief engineer-cum-secretary of the state water security and public health engineering department, told journalists. The landslide is 18km away from the Selep treatment plant. Water from Ratheychu is pumped into a pressure brake tank near 2nd Mile and then ferried to the treatment plant through the six main pipes. “Restoration work is in progress and we will try to restore the two main pipes by Saturday evening,” Basnett had said yesterday. Today, officials said the restoration was on at a war-footing and all personnel including the engineers were engaged in the process. “But it may still take three more days for the supply to become normal as the place where the landslide occurred is a sinking zone and a lot of debris have to be removed from the area,” an engineer of the department said. The damaged cast iron pipes would be replaced by high density polymer pipes, he said.

praful rao