Century-long history of rural community landslide risk reduction

Abstract

The study documents the more than century-long history of community-based landslide risk reduction of a small rural community in the village of Maršov, the Outer Western Carpathians, Czech Republic. The village is characterized by a high landslide hazard shown by repeated, rainfall-triggered, landslides, which have been inventoried and described using the available historical documents and field investigation. Although the occurring landslides are rather shallow (from 2 m to 10 m) and small (up to 37,000 m2), two of them seriously impacted the life of the community. Available historical data were used to describe direct as well as indirect damage caused by the landslides and the community's response to their occurrences. The first documented landslide (1911) caused no direct damage, but it alarmed the community and played an important role in the initiation of extensive land drainage works. Destruction of one third of the houses in the village by the 1967 landslide was swiftly resolved by relocation of the landslide affected families to the nearby town. This measure accelerated the decline and marginalization of the community, which became an important part of the local oral history that is still vivid 50 years after the event. We suggest that this fresh local memory of the catastrophic event contributed along with other factors (e.g. lack of funds, lack of interest of Maršov inhabitants in the site development) to adopting a largely restrictive territorial plan (in 2017), which if respected would effectively limit possible future landslide related damage.