Van Tuyl Lecture, April 14, 2025, Berthoud 205, 12-1pm

Paul Santi, CSM Geology and Geological Engineering

Reducing Risk from Landslides and Debris Flows: How to Respond when Mother Earth Doesn’t Love You

Abstract: As populations continue to push into the wildland-urban interface and climate change produces more severe storms and expanded wildfire impacts, tools for managing geologic hazards are becoming crucial to our society.  Our research has focused on identifying and reducing the impacts of hazards, with principal focus on landslides and debris flows.  I will present a summary of some of the recent research from our group, highlighting the variety of approaches we use to understand these hazards and to generate engineering solutions.  Principal problems including predicting and reducing debris flow avulsion onto new and unexpected paths, reducing growth in debris flows as they transit, identifying long runout landslides that endanger areas distant from their sources, and generating predictive methods to identify hazard locations without time-consuming field studies.