Risk in Geotechnical Practice: Are Design Professionals Liable for Failing to Anticipate the Effects of Climate Change?…
Climate change is the result of rising greenhouse gasses from a century and a half of development and industrialization around the world. The inability of the global community to reduce greenhouse gas...
Utah Sets Regional Water Conservation Goals, Aims to Cut Overall Use 16 Percent by 2030
Best Practices For Geotechnical Site Characterization: Have We Regressed from Decades Past?
The objective of a geotechnical site-characterization program is to determine soil and rock stratigraphy, in-situ pore water pressure conditions, and soil and rock properties for analysis and design of...
Risk, Resilience, Response
In accordance with the requirements of the America’s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018, U.S. drinking water providers must complete risk and resilience assessments and emergency response plans. Large water...
Treasured Trestle
Perched on a rugged cliff beside a bay, the aging Water Street Trestle #2 in Ketchikan, Alaska, had to be replaced or residents would have lost access to essential city services. Designed to last 75 years...
Adaptive Infrastructure To Mitigate Future Climate Risk: Building Upon Our Geotechnical Engineering Heritage
It’s time to recognize that past extreme events may no longer serve as reliable proxies for the future. Current infrastructure design concepts rely on historical events, assuming temporal stationarity...
Rethinking Barrier Island Restoration: Building a Resilient Louisiana Coast
Louisiana stands on the front lines of the United States’ fight against coastal erosion and land loss. A combination of rising sea levels, subsidence, wave action, human development, and sediment depravation...
Correcting The Cove
The city of Naples, Florida, has helped improve water quality by developing an ecologically friendly approach to managing stormwater where it enters a small cove of Naples Bay. With its "living shoreline"...
In the Wake of the Mount Polley Mine Tailings Breach: Tailings Dam Design, Innovation, and Practice Changes
The Mount Polley tailings dam in British Columbia (BC), Canada, failed in 2014, spilling approximately 21 million m3 of water and tailings (estimated as approximately 50/50 water and tailings) into Hazeltine...
Digital Water Cooler
To keep employees connected across geographically dispersed offices, help them share knowledge and technical resources, and just better understand their company and their clients, many engineering firms...
Storage for One More Century
Since its completion more than a century ago by a previous owner, Denver Water's Antero Dam has experienced seepage problems, forcing the utility to limit the storage capacity of the associated reservoir....
A New Approach to Mitigate Subsidence Problems: A New Approach to Mitigate Subsidence Problems
Mexico City has a decades-old problem with severe consequences: its lacustrine zone is subsiding due to pumping of potable water from the main aquifer. The geotechnical team assigned to work on the problem...
We Struck Water! Discovery of Artesian Groundwater Solves A 50-Year-Old Landslide Puzzle
Some unstable slopes fail dramatically, but most can be characterized by gradual, if not monotonously slow, movements. Yet these latter situations can pose a dilemma when a temporary repair is much simpler...
Geotechnics of the Suez Canal Construction: 150 Years Old, but Nearly Four Millennia in the Making
Construction of the Suez Canal created one of the most important waterways in the world, connecting the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Its construction from 1854 to 1869 created three cities, Port-Said, Ismailia,...
Connecting Continents: Challenges of the Eurasia Tunnel in Istanbul
The Eurasia Tunnel, the first bored tunnel crossing of the Istanbul Strait (Bosphorus) in Istanbul, Turkey, is a site that presents many unique challenges, including very poor ground conditions, unusually...
Adventures in Managing Water
Real-World Engineering Experiences
Sponsored by the River Basin Planning, Policy, and Operations Technical Committee of the Planning and Management Council of the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of ASCEAdventures in Managing...
Solutions for Soft Soils
Because of highly permeable soils and high water tables, deep foundations and basements in southeast Florida have been virtually impossible, limiting the excavation depths in cities like Miami and leading...
Properties of Biochar-Amended Highway Soils: Biochar – An Eco-friendly Geomaterial
Historically, geotechnical engineers have designed or modified soils and sediments to achieve particular strength, volume change, or flow characteristics. For example, lime and fly ash have been used to...
Oroville Dam Spillway Incident: Putting Community Safety First While Investigating the Cause
The Oroville Dam, and its associated reservoir and hydropower plant facility, is located on the Feather River in Northern California and is owned and operated by the State of California, Department of...
Appraisal of Lightweight Moorings for Deep Water
This paper outlines the potential advantages of using lightweight fiber ropes for mooring floating production platforms. The influence of tether properties on mooring system response is discussed. It is...
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