Could landslide be repeated at Tskneti-Betania road?

Experts are warning a landslide at the Tskneti-Betania road could be repeated if heavy rainfall begins again.

Specialists from the Geology Department at the Ilia State University’s Institute of Earth Sciences researched the June 13 major landslide and said there were several areas at the same slope where new landslides could form in the future.

"The new landslides will not be as massive as the one that happened on June 13 but still they will still be able to cause problems,” Lasha Sukhishvili, head of the Department said.

The scale of the June 13 landslide was 32 hectares, which was assessed by international experts as "colossal”.

Meanwhile the National Environment Agency’s Geology Department offered a recommendation to find a brand new route for the Tskneti-Betania road as the current one was within the dangerous zone.

The Infrastructure Ministry has started to restore the road that was destroyed by the landslide but the local environment experts believed an entirely new road needed to be built at a different place because the current road area was "very dangerous”.

The country’s Environment Minister Gigla Agulashvili said works had begun to temporarily rebuild the Tbilisi-Akhaldaba portion of the Tskhneti-Betania road as Akhaldaba, a small village nine kilometres away from Tbilisi, had no other road that connected it with the capital city.

He added the final decision regarding the Tskhneti-Betania road would be made once the area was thoroughly studied.

Click here to read a blog post by Agenda.ge's Editor-in-chief Natalia Amaglobeli who happened to be in the centre of the disaster on June 13.