Look on the other side

A picturesque sight, like this one, awaits you when you drive through the mountains on the way to Fujairah. The wide open spaces are enough to make big city dwellers, plagued by traffic, noise and lack of space envy those who live in these houses that dot the foothills. But talk to the people who live here and a different picture emerges.

When the skies are sunny, landslides are not an issue. But when the weather turns rough, as it did not so long ago, movement can become an issue. The recent rains brought this problem to the fore. A landslide at the Bathna area near the Masafi main road brought traffic to a halt.

Apparently, there is little that can be done in such an event except take precautionary measures if the warning is received sufficiently in advance. "In this kind of situation, the approach to mitigating disasters must be reactive to debri flow events," writes Andrew Heald, a chartered geologist and engineer, who has studied landslides in the UAE, Nepal, Bhutan and Peru. "In the long term, detection of when such an event (rainfall) is likely to occur may enable prevention of a catastrophic event in the event of it triggering a landslide."