Abstract
Early in the morning of April 3rd, 1980, approximately 1.15 × 106 m3 of soils from the coastal bluffs spread out over the tidal flat along the North Shore of the Jacques-Cartier Strait in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This landslide had a width of 410 m and had retrogressed back up to 110 m from the slope crest, cutting through Highway 138, 9 km west of the town of Havre-St-Pierre. In this area, the coastal bluffs are approximately 23 m high and consist, from the bottom to the top, of a thick marine sensitive clay unit from the Goldthwait Sea, overlain by 3 m of sand and 3 m of peat on top. The debris morphology has a “thumbprint-like pattern” characterized by unbroken blocks of intact clay forming elongated ridges, surrounded by a mixture of remoulded clay, sand and peat, aligned parallel to the bluff and arched in the direction of the flow. The absence of obstacles and the non-channeled character of the flow path of the Havre-St-Pierre landslide provide a good opportunity to characterize and analyze the post-failure stage of this large landslide in sensitive clays.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for its financial support and the Ministère des Transports du Québec for access to its archives. The authors would also like to thank Geneviève Cauchon-Voyer for the revision of the manuscript and her helpful comments.
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Locat, P., Leroueil, S., Locat, J., Demers, D. (2014). Characterization and Post-failure Analysis of the 1980 Landslide in Sensitive Clays at Havre-St-Pierre, Québec, Canada. In: L'Heureux, JS., Locat, A., Leroueil, S., Demers, D., Locat, J. (eds) Landslides in Sensitive Clays. Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7079-9_11
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