Location
New York, New York
Date
15 Apr 2004, 1:00pm - 2:45pm
Abstract
The city of Beirut is home to a very large number of historic monuments. Given the recent development boom following the years of civil strife, modern projects have begun to encroach on the spaces afforded older monuments. Recently, excavation works adjacent to the Lady of Annunciation Church resulted in severe cracking and deformations within the walls and floors of the stone and brick structure. The shoring provisions which were executed within the excavated lot consisted of contiguous bored piles with pre-stressed anchors. The failure occurred when the excavation works had progressed to a level of about 12m below original grade. Faced with the imminent catastrophic collapse of the church, the Municipality of Beirut ordered the immediate backfilling of the site in order to limit further movements. The case study presented in this paper includes the details and results of the geotechnical forensic investigation which included an array of measures and efforts, all implemented in an environment of urgency, given the need to find the cause of the failure, and propose and implement remedial measures which would spare the church. The analyses, monitoring measures and actual remedial works adopted and successfully completed at the site are presented and discussed.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
5th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
University of Missouri--Rolla
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2004 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
Sadek, Salah; Fayyad, Philippe; and Choucair, Walid, "Excavation Shoring Failure Threatens a Historic Church: Exploration of Causes and Remedial Measures" (2004). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 3.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/5icchge/session07/3
Excavation Shoring Failure Threatens a Historic Church: Exploration of Causes and Remedial Measures
New York, New York
The city of Beirut is home to a very large number of historic monuments. Given the recent development boom following the years of civil strife, modern projects have begun to encroach on the spaces afforded older monuments. Recently, excavation works adjacent to the Lady of Annunciation Church resulted in severe cracking and deformations within the walls and floors of the stone and brick structure. The shoring provisions which were executed within the excavated lot consisted of contiguous bored piles with pre-stressed anchors. The failure occurred when the excavation works had progressed to a level of about 12m below original grade. Faced with the imminent catastrophic collapse of the church, the Municipality of Beirut ordered the immediate backfilling of the site in order to limit further movements. The case study presented in this paper includes the details and results of the geotechnical forensic investigation which included an array of measures and efforts, all implemented in an environment of urgency, given the need to find the cause of the failure, and propose and implement remedial measures which would spare the church. The analyses, monitoring measures and actual remedial works adopted and successfully completed at the site are presented and discussed.
