ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: An earthquake of magnitude Mw = 7.7 occurred in the southeast coast of El Salvador on 13 January 2001, causing widespread damage to buildings and several kinds of civil engineering structures due to ground shaking and earthquake-induced ground failures, including several large-scale landslides. The most tragic among these landslides occurred on the steep northern flank of the Bálsamo Ridge, where an estimated 200,000 m3 of soil slid. Once mobilized, the landslide material behaved as semi-fluid mass and traveled northward an abnormally long distance of about 700 m into the Las Colinas neighborhood of SantaTecla and covered many houses, burying more than 500 people. The slide materials involved pyroclastic deposits, i.e., silty sands and sandy silts. This paper focuses on the features of the landslide, the properties of the soils involved, and the possible mechanism involved in the failure.
