The deadly landslide that buried part of the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen beneath a tide of red mud on Monday may be a devastating new consequence of China’s urban explosion, an expert has warned…

 “These sort of waste-flow slides are depressingly frequent and entirely preventable. We repeatedly see big piles of man-made waste sliding and engulfing populations. Far more people are killed than people generally realise,” said [Professor Dave Petley at the University of East Anglia]…More than 70% of landslides that kill people have an element of human cause,” he said…

Reports from Shenzhen indicate the government had been aware of the problem for years and banned builders from dumping waste on the mountain…But they were ignored…“There is a really high correlation between the corruption index and natural disasters,” [Farrokh Nadim at Norwegian Geotechnical Institute] said. “People just want to make high profit with cheap solutions that cost them nothing.”