The landslide of Kirf; a chain of governance failures

In January 2011 a landslide occurred in the German village of Kirf, which is between the town Saarburg and the border of Luxembourg. This slope failure caused a destruction of a federal main road over 50 meters. Stability calculations were made by a geotechnical consulting company, commissioned from the Federal Road Administration, in order to design the repair works and also to find out what really had happened. These calculations showed remarkably high safety factors. Nevertheless the consulting company blamed the families of the four houses down the slope for the failure, because they had made gabion walls in the toe of the slope. A research team of the University of Luxembourg discovered that this hilly area originally was called “On the slide” and has never been stabile according to their own calculations. So, the real question is why so many apparently uncorrelated mistakes were made in a single case.