T. D. O’Rourke | Geology Reports

USGS2009

Use of airborne and terrestrial lidar to detect ground displacement hazards to water systems

We investigate the use of multiepoch airborne and terrestrial lidar to detect and measure ground displacements of sufficient magnitude to damage buried pipelines and other water system facilities that might result, for example, from earthquake or rainfall-induced landslides. Lidar scans are performed at three sites with coincident measurements by total station surveying. Relative horizontal accuracy is evaluated by measurements of lateral dimensions of well defined objects such as buildings and tanks; we find misfits ranging from approximately 5 to 12 cm, which is consistent with previous work. The bias and dispersion of lidar elevation measurements, relative to total station surveying, is assessed at two sites: (1) a power plant site (PP2) with vegetated steeply sloping terrain; and (2) a relatively flat and unvegetated site before and after trenching operations were performed. At PP2, airborne lidar showed minimal elevation bias and a standard deviation of approximately 70 cm, whereas terrestrial lidar did not produce useful results due to beam divergence issues and inadequate sampling of the study region. At the trench site, airborne lidar showed minimal elevation bias and reduced standard deviation relative to PP2 (6-20 cm), whereas terrestrial lidar was nearly unbiased with very low dispersion (4-6 cm). Pre- and posttrench bias-adjusted normalized residuals showed minimal to negligible correlation, but elevation change was affected by relative bias between epochs. The mean of elevation change bias essentially matches the difference in means of pre- and posttrench elevation bias, whereas elevation change standard deviation is sensitive to the dispersion of individual epoch elevations and their correlation coefficient. The observed lidar bias and standard deviations enable reliable detection of damaging ground displacements for some pipelines types (e.g., welded steel) but not all (e.g., concrete with unwelded, mortared joints). ?? ASCE 2009.

Journal of Surveying Engineering↗

USGS1996

Mass wasting triggered by the 5 March 1987 Ecuador earthquakes

On 5 March 1987, two earthquakes (Ms=6.1 and Ms=6.9) occurred about 25 km north of Reventador Volcano, along the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains in northeastern Ecuador. Although the shaking damaged structures in towns and villages near the epicentral area, the economic and social losses directly due to earthquake shaking were small compared to the effects of catastrophic earthquake-triggered mass wasting and flooding. About 600 mm of rain fell in the region in the month preceding the earthquakes; thus, the surficial soils had high moisture contents. Slope failures commonly started as thin slides, which rapidly turned into fluid debris avalanches and debris flows. The surficial soils and thick vegetation covering them flowed down the slopes into minor tributaries and then were carried into major rivers. Rock and earth slides, debris avalanches, debris and mud flows, and resulting floods destroyed about 40 km of the Trans-Ecuadorian oil pipeline and the only highway from Quito to Ecuador's northeastern rain forests and oil fields. Estimates of total volume of earthquake-induced mass wastage ranged from 75-110 million m3. Economic losses were about US$ 1 billion. Nearly all of the approximately 1000 deaths from the earthquakes were a consequence of mass wasting and/ or flooding.

Engineering Geology↗