Landslides pose a serious physical and environmental threat to vulnerable communities living in areas of unplanned housing on steep slopes in the Caribbean. Some of these communities have, in the past, had to be relocated, at costs of millions of dollars, because of major slides triggered by tropical storm rainfall. Even so, evidence shows that: (1) risk reduction is a marginal activity; (2) there has been minimal uptake of hazard maps and vulnerability assessments and (3) there is little on-the-ground delivery of construction for risk reduction. This article directly addresses these issues by developing a low-cost approach to the identification of the potential pore pressure changes that trigger such slides.
Unplanned housing developments in vulnerable communities on steep tropical and subtropical hillslopes in many developing countries pose major problems. The authors present a new low-cost, community-based approach to landslide risk reduction and report on the successful pilot undertaken in the Skate Town community, Castries, St. Lucia, West Indies.
