Disaster analysis and lessons learned from the July 22, 2024, Ethiopian landslide

Abstract

Rainfall-induced landslides are often highly destructive. Reviewing and analyzing the causes, processes, impacts, and deficiencies in emergency response is critical for improving disaster prevention and management. From the night of July 21 to the morning of July 22, 2024, the Kencho Shacha Gozdi Village in Gezei Gofa, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region, Ethiopia, suffered heavy rainfall that triggered two landslides. By July 25, this event had claimed at least 257 lives. This study presents a detailed characterization of the landslides using multi-source data. By analyzing the landslide disaster process, this study summarizes key lessons and provides suggestions for preventing rainfall-induced geological hazards. The results indicate that rainfall has the greatest impact on the occurrence of landslides, while lithology and human activities have promoted and strengthened the landslide disaster. Despite the active disaster response in the local area, many problems were still exposed in the emergency response work. This analysis offers valuable insights for mitigating rainfall-induced geological hazards and enhancing emergency response capabilities.

Keywords

Rainfall-induced landslide / Disaster relief / Emergency response / Ethiopia / Lessons learned

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Tao Li: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Investigation, Conceptualization. Junxue Ma: Validation, Conceptualization. Yuan-dong Huang: Visualization. Shuhui Zhang: Visualization, Investigation, Conceptualization. Huiran Gao: Investigation. Chong Xu: Writing -review & editing, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influencethe work reported in this paper.The corresponding author Chong Xu is the Deputy EIC of Earthquake Research Advances and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

Author agreement and acknowledgment

All authors of this article all agree to this publication. This study was supported by the National Institute of Natural Hazards, Ministry of Emergency Management of China (2023-JBKY-57) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42077259).

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