Off topic - the Colorado earth flow.
These events happen on occasion in this type of a geologic setting. This one was pretty spectacular. The rains and snowfall over the past days and likely weeks, even months, set the stage by saturating a large volume of poorly-consolidated material on a fairly steep slope. I don't have any real details, but listening to the reports, it sounds likely that the mass started to slowly move, opening cracks that then allowed additional heavy rains and irrigation water (from a failing canal) to further saturate the ground. That added water not only liquefied and lubricated the poorly consolidated earth but made it much heavier, urging it to move down hill. And it finally did. The attached video shows that at the head of the earth flow there is a large rotational slump block that slid down into the space where the flow originated. The earth flowed down the valley, initially filling it, and at one point more than filled it and flowed over the side of the valley extending down and off to the right in the video. The fluid material in the original valley continued to flow down the valley, lowering the amount of material left behind at that point, which shows the maximum depth of the flow were it extends out of the valley over impressive relief. Here is a good article from the LA Times that also has an embedded video (helicopter footage of the flow as they flew from the toe - bottom of the flow - uphill to where it started). http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-colorado-mudslide-footage-20140526-story.html Colorado mudslide: Astonishing footage shows miles of devastation Los Angeles Times After a day of aerial and ground searches, Colorado officials failed to find three men who vanished after a massive May 26 mudslide wiped out miles of uninhabited land on Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mountain in the world. The immense power and scope of the slide — which, according to rough estimates, could be as much as eight times larger than the landslide that killed at least 41 people in Snohomish County, Washington, in March — astonished Colorado officials who surveyed the area by air. DirtDoc
