News Tagged: Earthquakes
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Laser scanner helps predict landslides
The Oregon Department of Transportation, like DOTs in most other states, has an ongoing struggle to maintain public highways against earth movements such as erosion, earthquakes and landslides. An earthquake or landslide can close down a road for days, while highway workers fight to keep supply lines open and repair the damage.
In Oregon, particularly along the coastal roads, these natural processes are a constant threat to transportation infrastructure. The damage caused by gradual erosion is typically not detectable until there is a landslide or other disaster, costing the state considerable time and money to repair. New technology has the potential to change this. Many landslides, in fact, show some form of movement prior to catastrophic failure. A team of researchers, led by Michael J. Olsen of Oregon State University and sponsored by a research grant from OTREC, set out to improve upon the methods that ODOT uses to detect and prevent structural threats.
Olsen details his findings in an OTREC final report. Click here for more on the project, or download the final report.
The research centers on a three-dimensional remote sensing technology known as LiDAR. Short for Light Detection and Ranging, LiDAR has been used for the last fifteen years in fields as diverse as archaeology, seismology, forestry, geology, and atmospheric physics. It is a “line-of-sight” method of 3D scanning, in which laser beams are aimed at terrestrial formations. After taking multiple scans from different vantage points of an area, researchers merge the scans together to form a complete 3D model of the site. The technique is sensitive enough to represent fine details, even down to the texture of the leaves on the vegetation when a high-definition scan is used. When scans of a cliff or embankment, even in lower definition, are compared with past scans of the same area, it becomes possible to determine the rate of erosion and to predict the location of a landslide. Highway workers can then do preventive maintenance to shore up structural weak points, rather than have to perform emergency missions to clear a destroyed road.
Tags: earthquakes, erosion, highway maintenance, landslides, lidar, oregon department of transportation, road repair
Researcher helping Oregon’s transportation network withstand quake like Japan’s
As a student at the University of British Columbia, Peter Dusicka pursued earthquake engineering in part because so few others had taken that path. “I was looking for a way to make a difference and looking for areas within civil engineering that seemed immature,” Dusicka said.
There was too much guesswork as to how well the Pacific Northwest’s transportation network would handle the type of subduction zone earthquakes the region is prone to. Now, thanks in part to Dusicka’s research, we know a lot more.
When it comes to the fragility of Oregon’s transportation system, the recent earthquakes around the Pacific Rim provide more insight into a major quake than do models developed for North America, said Dusicka an OTREC researcher and Portland State University associate professor. “The subduction zone earthquake in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia isn’t a threat anywhere else in the U.S.,” he said.
The recent Japanese quake as well as the one in Chile—both subduction-zone quakes—are more instructive. Subduction-zone quakes tend to be larger magnitude, shake longer and affect a larger geographic area than other earthquakes.
The serious earthquake related damage in Japan probably would have been worse had that country’s leaders not been spurred by the 1995 Kobe earthquake. “The Japanese people and government learned quite a bit from that event and reacted strongly,” Dusicka said.
“They’ve made significant investments in earthquake research. They have some of the newest facilities. The largest shake table in the world is there as a result.”
Tags: bridge damage models, bridges, earthquake engineering, earthquakes, peter dusicka, seismic, subduction zone
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