by Nick Drew | Thu 12 Apr 2018
Holbeck Hall Landslide: Classic kit in action (Blog Post Re-Visited)
The extreme weather events in the UK in recent years, which has seen serious flooding and landslides across large parts of the country, has prompted regular contributor and well known owner operator Ollie Kitchen to send in some photos from his own private collection. These shots feature some classic equipment at work cleaning up the aftermath of the Holbeck Hall landslide in Scarborough in 1993.
Between the nights of 3rd and 5th June 1993 a massive landslide destroyed the town’s only 4 star hotel Holbeck Hall. A massive rotational landslide took place spewing an estimated 1 million tonnes down the cliff towards the beach. A large section of this landslide actually ended up on the beach itself measuring some 200m wide and projecting some 135m out from the existing foot of the cliff.
As is often the case with these type of events heavy rainfall was identified as the cause for the slide with an estimated 140mm of rain falling in the two months prior to the slip. In fact on the Thursday night before the landslide some walkers had noticed cracks appearing in the ground around the hotel, a warning sign of what was to come the following day!
In the aftermath of the landslide heavy equipment was brought in to deal with the resulting spoil heap on the beach, with many companies involved including Tarmac and Hawkins Plant bringing in Caterpillar and Komatsu kit, including excavators, dozers and wheeled loading shovels.
The muck was loaded onto a fleet of Caterpillar D400D 40 tonne class dumptrucks by the excavators of choice in the day, Cat 200 series machines, consisting of 235 and 245 models.
Once the muck had been cleared away sea defence rock armour was brought in by lorries from a local quarry, this rock was then handled by the Cat excavators which had by then been fitted with rock handling grabs.
Some of these large boulders were loaded onto the Cat dumptrucks to be transported further along the beach.
Smaller rock armour was loaded onto the dumptrucks by a Komatsu shovel from Hawkins Plant.
We have recently experienced some of the warmest and wettest winters on record and events like the flooding and landslides make you realise just how vulnerable we are to the wrath of Mother Nature. Unless there is considerable investment in our flood and coastline defences in the future, events like this are going to become all the more common sadly.
The Digger Man Blog thanks Ollie for sharing these archive photos with us.