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The Holbeck Hall Hotel was a hotel in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England that was owned by the English Rose Hotels. It was originally owned as a private residence by Charles Anderson Smith, who built it sitting high atop a cliff with fabulous views overlooking the sea. On June 3, 1993, a landslip began underneath the hotel. The slide increased during a period of very heavy rains, and on June 7, 1993 the hotel slid completely off the cliff collapsing into the sea. The geological condition that was blamed for the loss was soil creep. Not uncommon in that area of England, it occurs in moderate and temperate climates when waterlogged sediment on a downward incline slowly moves over a hard under base material until it finds level or, as in this case, slides completely off a cliff into the sea. It is geologically slightly different from a landslide where a full-thickness section of land breaks loose on the side of a hill or cliff and slides down all together. The same process as soil creep can also occur in the sub-polar climates when the thawing of sediment in a permafrost area allows movement of the top layer over the harder base layer of permafrost. In this process it is called soilfluction or soil fluction instead of soil creep, but the method of land movement is essentially the same in both locations. In 1997, English Rose Hotels filed suit against the Council of the Scarborough Borough, stating that they failed to adequately prevent the slip on the coast where the hotel was located and that the Borough owned. This situation has become a significant court case now, cited frequently in British civil law cases and is also important and referenced in various geological studies. However, the suit was rejected by the court which ruled that the Council was not responsible for the causes of the landslip itself and therefore not At Fault in the hotel's collapse.

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16y ago

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