Location
St. Louis, Missouri
Date
01 Jun 1993 - 06 Jun 1993
Abstract
The sliding stability failure of the Kettleman Hills waste landfill focused attention on several issues related to the safe design and filling of waste repositories, including low strengths between geosynthetic material interfaces in composite liner systems and low interface strength between compacted clay and smooth geomembranes. Waste placement plans must be carefully developed to insure an adequate factor of safety against sliding at all stages of filling. Because of assumptions and uncertainties that remained following the initial failure investigation, model tests, at a scale of 1:150, were done. These tests reproduced the field failure very well and provided insights into the failure mechanisms. A three-dimensional method for stability analysis gave results in close agreement with field observations and the results of a subsequent detailed failure investigation done by others (Byrne et al., 1992). Those special cases of landfill geometry and liner properties for which the 3D stability may be more critical than that computed using usual 2D methods of analysis could then be determined.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
3rd Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
University of Missouri--Rolla
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 1993 University of Missouri--Rolla, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Mitchell, James K.; Chang, Mihsiung; and Seed, Raymond B., "The Kettleman Hills Landfill Failure: A Retrospective View of the Failure Investigations and Lessons Learned" (1993). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 4.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/3icchge/3icchge-session15/4
The Kettleman Hills Landfill Failure: A Retrospective View of the Failure Investigations and Lessons Learned
St. Louis, Missouri
The sliding stability failure of the Kettleman Hills waste landfill focused attention on several issues related to the safe design and filling of waste repositories, including low strengths between geosynthetic material interfaces in composite liner systems and low interface strength between compacted clay and smooth geomembranes. Waste placement plans must be carefully developed to insure an adequate factor of safety against sliding at all stages of filling. Because of assumptions and uncertainties that remained following the initial failure investigation, model tests, at a scale of 1:150, were done. These tests reproduced the field failure very well and provided insights into the failure mechanisms. A three-dimensional method for stability analysis gave results in close agreement with field observations and the results of a subsequent detailed failure investigation done by others (Byrne et al., 1992). Those special cases of landfill geometry and liner properties for which the 3D stability may be more critical than that computed using usual 2D methods of analysis could then be determined.
