Geotechnical Engineering Challenges in the Path to Resilient Infrastructure: Fid-Bau Portal

Geotechnical Engineering Challenges in the Path to Resilient Infrastructure

Nikolaou, Sissy / Antonaki, Nonika / Kourkoulis, Rallis / Gelagoti, Fani / Georgiou, Irene / Gazetas, George

Extreme climate and geological events are rare and occur when hardly anticipated based on statistical extrapolation from the past. When they happen, the low-probability events can potentially have disastrous impacts on infrastructure systems. Urban centers that rely heavily on their infrastructure are particularly vulnerable, as we were urgently reminded during Hurricane Sandy in New York City (NYC), the sequence of earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, and most recently the 2016 Muisne, Ecuador, earthquake. Geotechnical engineering must address the need to incorporate resiliency and sustainability for design and retrofit of infrastructure, which raises practical and philosophical questions requiring cross-disciplinary interactions with planners, architects, environmental scientists, owners, decision makers and the affected public at large. Building codes have moved towards risk-based design, as incorporated in the ASCE 7-16 seismic guidelines. This approach targets a risk level of failure, rather than the chance of an earthquake happening. Creating a similar framework for geotechnical design poses significant challenges due to greater uncertainties in material properties and difficulty in verification of performance objectives. Geotechnical design needs to move into a new mindset to address extreme events for an infrastructure system to be resilient and have a “fail-safe” “self-recentering” capability that will allow continuing operation or quick return to service, rather than strengthening the system to withstand the event.