Assessing locations susceptible to shallow landslide initiation during prolonged intense rainfall in the Lares, Utuado, and Naranjito municipalities of Puerto Rico

Abstract

Hurricane Maria induced about 70 000 landslides throughout Puerto Rico, USA, including thousands each in three municipalities situated in Puerto Rico's rugged Cordillera Central range. By combining a nonlinear soil-depth model, presumed wettest-case pore pressures, and quasi-three-dimensional (3D) slope-stability analysis, we developed a landslide susceptibility map that has very good performance and continuous susceptibility zones having smooth, buffered boundaries. Our landslide susceptibility map enables assessment of potential ground-failure locations and their use as landslide sources in a companion assessment of inundation and debris-flow runout. The quasi-3D factor of safety, F3, showed strong inverse correlation to landslide density (high density at low F3). Area under the curve (AUC) of true positive rate (TPR) versus false positive rate (FPR) indicated success of F3 in identifying head-scarp points (AUC = 0.84) and source-area polygons (0.85 ≤ AUC ≤ 0.88). The susceptibility zones enclose specific percentages of observed landslides. Thus, zone boundaries use successive F3 levels for increasing TPR of landslide head-scarp points, with zones bounded by F3 at TPR = 0.75, very high; F3 at TPR = 0.90, high; and the remainder moderate to low. The very high susceptibility zone, with 118 landslides km−2, covered 23 % of the three municipalities. The high zone (51 landslides km−2) covered another 10 %.