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

Creative Commons License
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

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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.