E – 2009 Risk Assessment, Analysis and Site Investigation

This presentation will address four topics: The first one will briefly address landslip risk assessment applied to either cities or highways or railways.
The second topic is debris flow. We will discuss a few examples and the major one that took place in Vargas Mountain, Venezuela.
The third topic will be site investigation. We will discuss how to plan a site investigation program with geophysics, boreholes, laboratory tests and, in some cases, in situ tests. We will discuss examples of dry slopes which failed under severe rainstorms.
Finally, we will discuss slope stability analysis through limit equilibrium Methods (LEM), how to select a factor of safety, the use of appropriate software, and when LEM can or cannot be used.
The Slope course is based on the Handbook of slope stabilization, a copy of which will be made available to the participants.