One year ago in Logan, Utah, a landslide caused a portion of an irrigation canal to fail, resulting in a secondary mudslide. A mother and two children were killed in the slope failure. Portions of the landslide area remain relatively untouched one year later as wrongful death lawsuits naming the City of Logan, Utah Department of Transportation, Utah State University are being resolved in court. Negotiations between family members and the private canal company could also end up in court. The City has acquired a number of the affected properties and hopes to turn the area into green space. [Source: The Salt Lake Tribune. Image: Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune]
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Geotechnical Engineering Challenges of British Columbia’s Sea-to-Sky Highway, gateway to the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been enjoying watching the 2010 Olympic Winter games over the past few days. If you have, you know that Whistler is the venue for many of the sports including alpine skiing, luge, skeleton, bobsled, ski jumping, biathlon and cross-country skiing among others. The Whistler area is located about 50-miles or so North of Vancouver. In order to get to Whistler, you need to drive along Highway 99, better known as the Sea-to-Sky Highway. This highway has a long history of geotechnical problems, including some significant structurally controlled rockslides and landslides. In the years leading up to these Olympic Games a fair amount of work was done on the highway with some significant geotechnical innovations.
City of Vancouver sues over failed shoring
The City of Vancouver is suing a developer, excavation contractor and their consulting engineer for the costs of repairs, overtime for city employees and lost revenue from parking meters etc stemming from an apparent failure of a shoring system that formed a 30-meter sinkhole. No mention of the developer’s name or the engineer, but the contractor was Matcon Excavation and Shoring. The site will be the future home of high-rise condominiums…if the City lifts it’s stop work order.
The failure of the shoring caused a break inf a 20-cm water main ultimately flooding the site. It also necessitated the closure of the adjacent street. Of course this invites the whole chicken or the egg scenario. The defendants will probably argue that the water line failed first causing the failure of the shoring, but of course the City Engineer, Tom Timm was not shy about fingering the shoring as being deficient.
"It’s some kind of a failure of the shoring system . . . either a design issue or the way it was put in place."