Landslide transportation network and lifelines: Rockfall and debris flow

Abstract

Roads, rails and pipelines often are crossing areas with rock faces and steep slopes in mountainous areas. Rockfalls and debris flows are frequent fast moving landslides, which constitute hazards and can damage infrastructures requiring additional serviceability, crash or bury vehicles and result in death. These type of landslide events are characterised by very fast trigger and evolution and so, even if they are typically preceded by intense rain, they occurs without any clear warning. The first think to do in these cases, is to understand the entity and the distribution of these phenomena along the transportation corridor by means of computational instruments able to compute slope hazard; then consolidation works have to be designed taking the risk distribution along the corridor into consideration; the consolidations or the protection works have to be started where the risk is higher and, therefore, more urgent. In this paper, methods that refer about the geotechnical aspects of fast landslide movements constituting hazard for the transportation network and the consequent mitigation works will be discussed. Some applicative examples are reported too. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.