Rock slope monitoring and risk management for railway infrastructure in the white canyon, British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

Research conducted during the course of the Canadian Railway Ground Hazard Research Program has focused on applying new remote sensing techniques to the assessment of ground hazards. The work undertaken at the White Canyon, British Columbia, is reported in this paper include data on this actively moving slope that has been collected using terrestrial LiDAR scans and Gigapan photography. Analysis of the LiDAR data has permitted identification of the location, volume and mobility of rocks down the slope. The smallest volume of rock movement detected is far smaller than that observable by the human eye when observing the changes in the slope. Analysis of the Gigapan panoramas permits evaluation of the size of particles moving down slope. Particles as small as cobble sized rocks can be tracked in some of the slower moving, but active talus slopes. Ongoing data collection will provide a longer term rock slope observation data base, from which it should be possible to identify the conditioning and triggering events leading to rockfall or debris movement, and will permit comparison between data sets collected using these two remote sensing techniques. .