| Intensive rainfall and recent land development are major causes of landslides. If roads, railways, or other infrastructure are damaged by a landslide, traffic is blocked, impacting regional social and economic life. Occurrence of landslides not only induces direct damage to property and roads but also causes emotional distress, economic losses and harmful rumor for the area. This indirect damage tends to last long in proportion to time required to stabilize the slope, although the actual conditions of those damages have not been investigated well until today. In this study, the authors introduce the case study from Miyagi Prefecture in Japan, where a regional road was closed due to the damage caused by a landslide in February 2007. This road was frequently used by local residents and for transportation. Detour took extra 86 minutes at maximum to travel, and the time differed depending on traffic origin and destination. Road was closed for 44 days in total causing inconvenience for local residents and damaging to tourist industry because of decrease in the number of visitors.The authors estimated total monetary loss caused by the road closure, concerning extra traveling time and cost occurred by detouring, traffic volume and the number of tourists, to be found approximately 500 million yen was lost for the 44 days. Since the disaster occurred in a busy sightseeing season, the amount was also expected to be higher than other time of a year. As above, road closure by the occurrence of a landslide was considered to have caused significant financial loss in the area. To reduce the loss appropriate emergency measure is to be applied as soon as possible with understanding of landslide behavior. |
