Road Weather Management Program
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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Title:

Evaluation of Active Landslide at Highway 299 Using Wireless In-Place Inclinometers with High-Density Accelerometer Networks

Abstract:

Mitigation of active landslides that encroach on highways represents a significant and costly challenge for geologists and engineers at many state transportation departments. A section of Highway 299 in Northern California represents a good case history of an active landslide that requires costly and continuous maintenance in an attempt to maintain a safe roadway for the driving public. An important part of the stabilization design includes subsurface instrumentation to locate and characterize all potential failure surfaces. Failure surfaces may reside at multiple levels and the rate and direction of movement of each failure mass may be different. Conventional slope inclinometer instrumentation can be used to monitor landslides with some important limitations: (a) the useful life of a conventional inclinometer is limited to relatively small shear displacements, (b) deeper shear failure surfaces may go undetected in cases where relatively faster moving upper shear movements occur, and (c) conventional inclinometer systems require multiple field visits increasing monitoring costs and valuable personnel and equipment resources. This paper presents results of an ongoing remote landslide monitoring project using a new in-place inclinometer technology based on a high-density network of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems accelerometer sensors spaced at one-foot intervals. This innovative instrumentation system is easy to install in the field, uses a compact and relatively inexpensive wireless field data collection device, and provides a fully integrated data management and presentation software solution via a standard web browser.

Source(s):

87th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, California DOT. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2007

Author:

Lemke, Hagy, Brittsan

Keywords:


Subsurface conditions

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