OVERVIEW OF THE NORTH CAROLINA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY'S LANDSLIDE HAZARDS PROGRAM

The North Carolina Geological Survey’s (NCGS) Landslide Hazards Program conducts county-scale landslide inventory and susceptibility mapping, landslide monitoring, landslide risk analysis, and provides technical assistance to emergency managers and the public in response to landslide events. The Program provides stakeholders with timely unbiased and accurate scientific information enabling people and communities to make informed decisions about protecting public safety and property, reduce potential landslide losses, and improve community resilience. We help western North Carolina’s rapidly increasing population and development address the challenges of living, working, and building in the mountains. There have been at least 85 fatalities, 22 injuries, 87 destroyed or condemned homes, and damage to 60 others resulting from landslides in western North Carolina since 1879. Landslides continually threaten western North Carolina’s regional infrastructure and have cost over $53 million in direct loses since 1990. In 2005, NCGS created, and continually updates, a GIS landslide inventory geodatabase using remote mapping, boots on the ground, and responses to landslide events. We combine landslide inventory data with historical and meteorological data to shed light on landslide triggering events and their connections with geology, climate, weather patterns, forest cover/burned areas, and land use. We partner with the National Weather Service (NWS) to track frequency and magnitude of landslide triggering storms and advise them regarding public warnings for potential landslides during storm events. Future improvements to our program include AI/ML landslide detection and mapping, studying the influence of historical mining and prospecting on landslide pre-conditioning and triggering, and modeling debris flow deposition geometries.