Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering

After making brief stops at airports in Japan and Manila and traveling for 34 hours, Vern Schaefer, professor of geotechnical engineering and the Hoover Chair in Geotechnical Engineering set foot on soil in the Philippine’s Province of Leyte. It took him and his University of Florida colleague, Luis Campos, another four hours in the car on rather primitive concrete roads to reach their final destination, St. Bernard.

Schaefer traveled to the Philippines during the summer as part of a National Science Foundation-funded reconnaissance team investigating the February 17, 2006, landslide in the Philippines. The landslide occurred suddenly following several weeks of heavy rain and a relatively mild earthquake. It killed between 2,000 and 3,000 people.

“The earthquake hitting the saturated rock materials was sufficient to cause a massive rockslide that moved 15 million cubic yards of material,” says Schaefer. “The top of the rock scarp is 2,500 feet above the valley floor. The rock and soil debris field moved 1.6 miles out from the slope.”

During this visit, Schaefer and Campos conducted terrestrial-based laser scanning of the landslide in order to develop detailed topographic maps of the site. They worked with officials from a division of the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the dean of the Mapúa Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Materials Science Engineering in Manila to conduct their investigation.

Schaefer previously traveled to the site in June 2006 to meet with government officials and begin investigating the landslide’s cause. He says he’s amazed at the landslide’s size.

He also says he enjoyed meeting the Philippine people on the trip. In fact, while on the landslide site, a group of 12-year-old girls stopped to visit with Schaefer because he was the first American they’d ever seen in person.

“They asked many questions about the United States, primarily if what they saw on TV was real,” he says.

Schaefer had other memorable parts of his journey, too. “It was very hot and humid. We spent many hours walking up various parts of the landslide,” he says. “Just carrying our water supply was a chore.”

Schaefer also says he was surprised by the availability of cell phone reception at the site. “On the first trip, we took a satellite phone since we didn’t know what our communication situation would be,” he says. “It turns out that we got good cell phone service on the landslide. Most people in the Philippines has a cell phone because it costs only a couple dollars a month. They never had land phones but jumped to the new technology as soon as it came along.”

Now that Schaefer’s returned home, his next step is to write a report assessing the current stability of the landslide site and submit it to the National Science Foundation and government agencies in the Philippines.