For weeks, residents of the valley under the unstable mountainside known as “Mannen” in Romsdal have been warned it could come crashing down on them. Now it looks like they’re getting a respite.
Geologists said this week that despite heavy rain and bad weather, the movement in the mountain’s rocky mass has slowed considerably. The mountainside is rigged with sensors and under constant monitoring, and the geologists reported that the upper and central portions of the mountainside had only moved four to five millimeters on Wednesday. That’s just a tenth of the activity registered in late October, when residents were evacuated.
“We see that the mountain’s movements are reduced,” chief geologist Lars Harald Blikra of the preparedness agency Åknes/Tafjord Beredskap told news bureau NTB. “We expected that, as colder temperatures set in.”
He said the mountain remains far from stable, though, so surveillance and preparation for a massive rockslide will continue. A new rainy spell is all it could take for the rocky mass to finally loosen and crash down. Weather forecasts for the next few days were mostly dry.
newsinenglish.no staff
