Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 2547–2565, 2020 https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-2547-2020 © Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Assessment of the physical vulnerability of buildings affected by slow-moving landslides Qin Chen1, Lixia Chen2, Lei Gui1, Kunlong Yin1, Dhruba Pikha Shrestha3, Juan Du4, and Xuelian Cao2 1Engineering Faculty, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, China 2Institute of Geophysics and Geomatics, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, China 3Department of Earth Systems Analysis, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, the Netherlands 4Three Gorges Research Center for Geohazards, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, China Correspondence: Lixia Chen (
[email protected]) Received: 27 September 2019 – Discussion started: 16 October 2019 Revised: 25 July 2020 – Accepted: 6 August 2020 – Published: 29 September 2020 Abstract. Physical vulnerability is a challenging and funda- hope that the established physical vulnerability curves can mental issue in landslide risk assessment. Previous studies serve as tools for the quantitative risk assessment of slow- mostly focus on generalized vulnerability assessment from moving landslides. landslides or other types of slope failures, such as debris flow and rockfall, while the long-term damage induced by slow- moving landslides is usually ignored. In this study, a method was proposed to construct physical vulnerability curves for 1 Introduction masonry buildings by taking the Manjiapo landslide as an example. The landslide’s force acting on the buildings’ foun- Physical vulnerability is a fundamental and indispensable dation is calculated by applying the landslide residual-thrust item in the risk definition presented by Varnes (1984).