Landslides associated with recent road constructions in the Río Lucma catchment, eastern Cordillera Blanca, Peru

Abstract

Extensive road construction works recently took place in the remote eastern part of the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca, aiming at a better connection of isolated mountain communities with regional administrative centres. Here we document and characterize landslides associated with these road construction efforts in the Río Lucma catchment, Peru. We show that a total area of 321,332 m2 has been affected by landslides along the 47.1 km of roads constructed between 2015 and 2018. While landslides downslope the roads (48.2%) and complex landslides crossing the roads (46.4%) were the most frequent landslide types in relation to the position of the road; slide-type movement (60.7%) prevails over the flow-type movement (39.3%). Timewise, we found that 75.0% of landslides were observed simultaneously with road construction work, while the remaining 25.0% occurred up to seven months after the roads had been constructed. We plotted the lagged occurrence of these subsequent landslides against precipitation data, showing that 85.7% of them were observed during the wet season (November to April). We conclude that the majority of mapped landslides were directly associated with road constructions and that the road constructions also may set preconditions for landslides, which mainly occurred during the subsequent wet season.