Microphones and rain buckets are being used to help detect landslides before they happen [Video]

On the night of Aug. 6, 2010, a large chunk of Mount Meager in southwestern British Columbia sheared off its face and fell to the valley below in the largest landslide in Canadian history.

No one was killed, partly because the area north of Whistler is so remote. But roads and property were destroyed.

“It’s just so incredible that an event so large didn’t end up with any fatalities. This is truly a catastrophic scale of event,” said Glyn Williams-Jones, an earth sciences professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.

As co-director of the Centre for Natural Hazards Research, Williams-Jones is one of the minds behind the installation of a new network of ultrasensitive microphones in Pemberton, B.C., near Mount Meager, that could give early warnings by detecting “the fingerprint of a landslide.”

“If we need time to respond, we need to be hearing, seeing measuring those events as …