(Photos off my TV screen)
I don't know how rar and wide the news of this event has spread over the world (if at all), but around 1½ hour after midnight on 23 September, a massive landslide occurred in southwest Sweden, causing severe damage to the motorway [E6] between Sweden's second largest city Gothenburg, and Norway's capital Oslo. Seeing images from it on TV, it seems miraculous to me that (from what I've heard) no one was killed. (Had it happened in the daytime, with more traffic, it could have been a lot worse.)
According to the news agency Reuters (23 Sept):
A large chunk of a motorway in southwest Sweden collapsed overnight, causing three people to be taken to hospital with light injuries, police said on Saturday.
The landslide damaged the motorway between Sweden's second-biggest city Gothenburg and Norway's capital Oslo, near the small town of Stenungsund, around 50 km north of Gothenburg on Sweden's west coast.
"The hardest hit parts of the landslide area measure around 150 x 100 meters. In total, however, the landslide has affected an area of around 700 x 200 meters," the Gothenburg Rescue Services said in a statement.
The slide affected around ten vehicles, a wooded area, a business area with a gas station and a fast food restaurant, the rescue services said.
"A number of people have been helped out of vehicles in the slide area with the help of fire personnel and a helicopter."
Several cars and one truck had fallen into holes and cracks caused by the landslide, Swedish news agency TT reported.
A rescue services spokesperson told public broadcaster SVT all people in the vehicles had been helped out.
Police said on their website they had launched a probe into whether work at a nearby construction site may have caused the slide. ---
I think I probably react a bit "extra" looking at these scenes on my TV screen, because this happened quite close to where my brother and I were driving only about 1½ month ago (and in very rainy weather), on our holiday road trip to the west coast...
(Repairs to this road will no doubt take a long time and will be causing traffic problems for quite a while onward.)
