How do mine operators/managers/engineers know, days/weeks in advance, that a land slide is going to occur?
In: Engineering
They pay a lot of attention to how the ground behaves. In general landslides tends to start very slowly, as in millimeters a day. It may be hard to see this unless you know what to look for. You might see some cracks appear slowly or a level road might not be level any more. But they also use more sensitive equipment to measure the movement of the ground around things like mines and construction zones. And if they catch the landslide early then they might have time to do something about it. If not then just evaccuating the area helps a lot.
A lot of instrumentation and technology! I don’t have any direct experience with this, but I did sit through a few related presentations while working at an open pit copper mine.
Land slides are not usually sudden events, and will have measureable indicators. Many are not visible to the human eye, but some are.
Our site used LIDAR (laser range finding) survey equipment to scan slopes, and track the amount of movement per day. It is basically a laser rangefinder that moves left and right, up and down taking measurements every couple of inches, and outputting a color coded LIDAR point cloud that represented day to day change as a color spectrum (red areas had a lot of movement, blue did not).
I believe they first used visual indicators, such as cracking, and other less comprehensive instrumentation to identify areas of concern. Then they used the LIDAR scanners to monitor change at those areas and predict when the major failures would occur.
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