Resilient Geotechnics – Past Failures And Future Success

The concept of resilience applied to engineering systems has gained importance in recent years. Geotechnically, all infrastructure assets interact with the ground and so resilient geotechnical solutions must meet a range of plausible conditions including not only stability and serviceability, but increasingly, repairability, growing demands, climate change and impacts from surrounding works.

Resilience may be described as the ability of a system to adjust its functioning in response to changes while satisfying performance, economy and safety objectives. In the infrastructure engineering context, the notion of resilience can apply to fixed assets, but more perhaps more influentially it applies to the organisations that design, construct and operate those assets. This paper documents historic examples of geotechnical and other engineering failures where geotechnical resilience was deficient, and lessons learnt which can be used to increase resilience in future applications. Failures are reviewed in the lights of “traditional” or “linear” safety engineering concepts which include contributing factors such as people, processes and products. The evolution of safety engineering concepts is also examined by looking at improving risk management, design standards and construction processes towards Resilience Engineering (considering both assets and organisations), where risk is actively managed to achieve superior outcomes. Despite these advances over time, recent failures show that some of these lessons must be painfully re-learned; wisdom is difficult to teach.

Looking forward towards to achieving resilience in future infrastructure design, this paper considers global economic, social, and environmental factors which interact with the field of geotechnics, and how this discipline plays a role in creating robust, flexible infrastructure organisations and assets which are safe, secure, and resilient to what the future may hold. Examples of how climate change and changing societal needs may impact projects are discussed alongside future research trends and emerging geotechnical innovations such as Building Information Management (BIM) and performance based design.

Collectively, the failure examples, risk management guidance and Resilience Engineering concepts herein are provided so that geotechnical practitioners can benefit from case history learnings and can apply new tools to future geotechnical engineering challenges. By knowing what to do, what to look for, what to expect and what has happened (historically and in the project timeframe) then safe, reliable and efficient infrastructure can be created.