‘Walking hill’ causes more havoc

Press, 17 December 1982, Page 6

‘Walking hill’ causes more havoc

By

MICHAEL SHERIDAN

of NZPA-Reuter Ancona Frightened residents expect “the walking* hill,” a huge moving mass of earth, to wreak more destruction as it slides towards the Adriatic Sea, leaving over 4000 people homeless. Two residential districts look as if they have been sacked by an invading Army. Houses still standing are emptied of belongings, their doors and windows hanging ajar. Washing hangs on lines outside cracked, abandoned apartment blocks. . People fled as a movement of the Earth over some six square kilometres edged towards the coast, where geologists said it would meet subterranean resistance, causing it to buckle and crack.

On the ground it is difficult to judge the over-all picture. But standing at the centre, on a ridge overlooking the sea, the fissures widen by the hour while buildings and walls tilt at crazy angles and then collapse. One by one, the signs of civilisation—gas, telephones, electricity and water—are being cut off. People who lived on the heights over Ancona are making their new homes in requisitioned hotels, schools and hostels. There is no wall of earth engulfing houses, just a steady, relentless subsidence that announces its menace with a sudden crack that appears in a wall, a yawning gap in the pavement, and a trickling away of the soil. When -the subterranean movement mets resistance it seems to turn back on itself, heaving up railway tracks and tarmac as if wrecked by high explosive and bringing •buildings crashing down. . It is a phenomenon that baffles geologists and has been variously blamed on recent heavy rain, the area’s history of seismic instability and excessive, frequently unlicensed, building on unsuitable land.

But experts remain unable to'predict exactly what the earth will do next. Some say it could continue to rumble inexorably into the sea. others say that it will halt and level but at the sea-line. Meanwhile, civil authorities are faced with thousands of homeless people who are unlikely to return to ; 'the land that has slipped away.