Helicopter-Based Geophysical Reconnaissance of Levees: A Faster, Cost-Effective Tool for Assessing Their Risk
As with much of the nation's infrastructure, people are becoming more and more aware of the condition of levee systems in the United States. The media cast a spotlight on the New Orleans levee failures...
Dry Dams in the Desert: Chasing Land Subsidence and Earth Fissures with Geophysics
Homogenous embankment dam flood retention structures (FRSs) were built throughout central Arizona desert basins in the mid-twentieth century to protect mostly agricultural lands and military installations...
When Bridges, Roadways, and Dams Need Our Help: Innovative Techniques Can Help Save Our Nation's Critical Infrastructure
The nation's infrastructure is showing its age. The signs are obvious with structure distress, lack of functionality, and failure reported frequently over the last several decades. Specialty geotechnical...
NTSB Issues Preliminary Report on Florida Bridge Collapse (part of Infrastructure Solutions: Bridges Move Forward)
In late May, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released its preliminary report about the March 15 structural failure and collapose of a partially-constructed pedestrian bridge in Miami....
ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
The journal will meet the needs of the researchers and engineers to address risk, disaster and failure-related challenges due to many sources and types of uncertainty in planning, design, analysis, construction,...
Low-Gravity Experiments: Shear Testing Takes a Nose Dive
A major challenge to making celestial soil mechanics viable is to re-engineer the profession's toolkit to provide geotechnical solutions without the luxury of ex-situ and in-situ testing as we know them...
Railway Geotechnical Asset Management in Great Britain: How Modern-Day Techniques Help Monitor Railway Infrastructure Dating to the 1800s
This article discusses asset management, risk management, and earthworks failures as experienced by Network Rail (NR), the owner, operator, and asset manager of the majority of the rail network of Great...
Remote Sensing: A New Revolution in Geotechnical Engineering
Remote sensing in the form of satellite imagery has become part of our everyday life—from displaying boring locations at a job site to the various mapping apps on our smart phones that help us get there....
Nature Sides with the Hidden Flaw: Lessons Learned from Failures of Earth-Support Systems
In recent years, the demand for excavations and fills of significant height has increased due to many factors, including requirements for below-grade parking for urban buildings and the need to construct...
Emergency Retaining Wall Replacement: The East 26th Street Slide Repair in Baltimore, MD
During a record rainfall on April 30, 2014, a century-old, stone retaining wall between a dense urban roadway (26th Street) and the CSXT railroad track in Baltimore, MD, failed. The stone retaining wall...
Post-Earthquake Reconnaissance Using Digital Imagery: A Bird's-Eye View
Over the last decade, remote sensing has played an increasing role in geotechnical earthquake reconnaissance through the use of satellite imagery, LIDAR, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These techniques...
The 2010-2011 Canterbury, New Zealand, Earthquake Sequence: Impetus for Rethinking the Way We Evaluate and Mitigate Liquefaction
Liquefaction is a common cause of ground failure during earthquakes and is directly responsible for tremendous damage to infrastructure. Evidence of the impact of liquefaction includes failure of bridge...
A Light in the Deep: The Future of Offshore Site Investigations
For deep-water energy developments, hazard identification and risk assessments (that is, assessing the probability of occurrence along with the consequences of failure) are more important...
Evaluating Bridges With Unknown Foundations for Susceptibility to Scour: North Carolina Applies Risk-Based Guidelines to Over 3,750 Bridges
Scour occurs when flowing water removes erodible material such as sand and rock. For bridges over water, scour affects the stability of pier and abutment foundations and contributes to...
Achieving Success and Avoiding Failures with Permeable Pavements
This chapter provides experienced-based recommendations on how to achieve success with permeable pavements. This information is based on an informational survey completed by designers,...
Loading, Geometry, and Analysis
This Standard applies to latticed steel transmission structures. These structures shall be either self-supporting or guyed. They consist of hot-rolled or cold-formed prismatic members...
Dynamic Shearing Properties Of Compacted Clay
A series of 116 Q-type triaxial compression tests was performed using specimens of Goose Lake clay compacted at water contents ranging from 9 percent dry of optimum to 3 percent on the...
Failure of a Large Circular Excavation
A circular excavation, 117 feet (36 m) in diameter by 90 feet (27 m) deep, was designed by an experienced engineering firm and construction was performed by an experienced contractor....
Failure of a Twenty-Foot High Retaining Wall
A cantilever retaining wall, designed in apparent accord with provisions in a civil engineering handbook, failed soon after construction. Analyses of the causes of the failure are presented....
Shear and Interface Strength of Clay at Very Low Effective Stress
Thin-specimen direct shear (TSDS) tests were conducted to measure the shearing strength of kaolinite, and interface strengths between kaolinite and acrylic plastic and anodized aluminum,...
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