Photo: Landslide along Vientiane-Luang prabang route
"Landslides are a major obstacle to rural transport. Even though we have companies to maintain the roads, it always takes days to clear landslides. This means that farmers cannot get to markets and children cannot get to school", Professor Nhinxay Visane of the National University of Laos told the Lao national press this week. Laos is a mountainous country and needs to find solutions to reinforce hillsides to combat erosion. Large amounts of money have been invested in rural roads and access, but there remains a need to improve the scientific and engineering knowledge necessary to find solutions, and to ensure that the investments in road building continue to yield returns for poor rural communities.
To prevent soil erosion, the road crew must learn how to plant the trees at the tops of the hills to help keep the top soils in place, not just to clear away the slides from the roads.Remember: plant the grasses and the trees on top of the mountains' tops.
best way to battle land erosion problem is.. no clear cutting along the side of the road. as you can see on the picture above, the area of erosion is lack of vegitations. it only take few days of raining, the ground will become saturate and something got to gives. the gravity will just take over at that point.
i dont know what kind of planting program does Laos have. i saw alot of clear cutting on lao forest.
In Japan, they surface the slope of mountains that has trend to have a landslide with concrets. Some places that have trees can not garantee the landslide. It is about the morphology structure of the soils and know-how of engineering need to be applied to protect the landslide.
I saw in may parts of northern Thailand, they built the concrete walls along the slopes of the mountains to keep the soils in place and to built the small canals across the roads and along'the sides of them to allow the rain water to run to the bottoms of the mountains.
