Landslide, Storms, and Power Outages Rock Norway

NORWAY – More than 50 persons were evacuated from their homes when a large landslide ripped through a rural area outside Trondheim on Sunday. 

It was a brutal start to the New Year, following a string of storms that also forced evacuations in western Norway earlier in the week. Geologists said it was too early to determine exactly what caused the landslide at Byneset in Trøndelag, which extended over around half-a-kilometer of farmland. One geologist told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) that the ground in the area was characterized by unstable clay and that the stormy weather of the past week may have contributed to the landslide. 

It set off full catastrophe alarms Sunday morning but by the end of the day, no homes had been destroyed and no lives lost. The evacuations were made because of the unstable groundmass. “We’re not at all certain that the slide is over,” Kari Øvrelid of the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) told NRK. 

“We need to keep monitoring this.” She said the danger of more landslides had been reduced, but 22 persons remained under evacuation orders Sunday night. Police, civil defense personnel, geologists and local government officials were using special equipment to monitor ground movement in the darkness. There were also concerns that the huge volumes of earth would clog local creeks and set off flooding. 

The latest emergency outside Trondheim followed a week of severe storm damage that climaxed with the hurricane known as Dagmar that swept through western and north-central Norway and also hit Trondheim hard. Farther to the west, in Stryn, some families remained without power or telephone connections for the seventh day in a row. “This is really like being back in the good old days,” Anne Sølvi Sande Hoem told NRK. She and her three children haven’t had electricity since Christmas Day, but she considers herself lucky. The house next door in Lodalen was all but destroyed in the hurricane. Sande Hoem said the long-term power outage created practical challenges, not least with three small children in the house. 

“Things you take for granted, like washing clothes in the washing machine or having an internet connection, suddenly disappear,” she said. A generator has helped save food in the freezer and refrigerator, and wood-burning stoves are keeping the house warm. As in most Norwegian homes at this time of year, they also had lots of candles on hand.

By:  Newswire