Location
Arlington, Virginia
Date
14 Aug 2008, 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Abstract
It is a fact that the retaining wall failures have occurred in the distant past as also in recent times and will recur inevitably in future. The reasons of failure are ultimately the errors of judgment to which no humans including the greatest of engineers are immune. Free flow of information on failure incidents is greatly inhibited in most of the cases by the natural tendency to avoid publicizing our mistakes although all human are prone to them. The present study through light on a failure of a recently constructed R.C.C. counter fort Retaining wall. The wall is located near Sangli city in Maharashtra state of India. The wall was constructed in 2003 and there was a heavy rainfall occurred in all over the Maharashtra state continuously in the year 2005 and 2006 subsequently in the catchments of river Krishna. The wall could not sustain the flood impact and there was a sliding, collapse and even rotational failure at some portion of wall was observed. Basically this wall was constructed to protect a village road about 1800m along a stream from flood water. Failure of any structure is usually not attributable to a single cause but in the present case at the prima-facie, it seems that the wall failed due to heavy flood and backwater in the stream from river Krishna and the improper design criteria. The other principle causes of the failure are found out and the remedial measures have been suggested. In this article, an attempt has been made by the authors to make an unbiased technological analysis of the data available, motivated by a desire to find ways of avoiding past mistakes and not sitting on judgment on them!
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
6th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2008 Missouri University of Science and Technology, 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
Padhye, R. D. and Ullagaddi, P. B., "Case Study of Failure of a R.C.C. Counterfort Retaining Wall" (2008). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 16.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/6icchge/session02/16
Case Study of Failure of a R.C.C. Counterfort Retaining Wall
Arlington, Virginia
It is a fact that the retaining wall failures have occurred in the distant past as also in recent times and will recur inevitably in future. The reasons of failure are ultimately the errors of judgment to which no humans including the greatest of engineers are immune. Free flow of information on failure incidents is greatly inhibited in most of the cases by the natural tendency to avoid publicizing our mistakes although all human are prone to them. The present study through light on a failure of a recently constructed R.C.C. counter fort Retaining wall. The wall is located near Sangli city in Maharashtra state of India. The wall was constructed in 2003 and there was a heavy rainfall occurred in all over the Maharashtra state continuously in the year 2005 and 2006 subsequently in the catchments of river Krishna. The wall could not sustain the flood impact and there was a sliding, collapse and even rotational failure at some portion of wall was observed. Basically this wall was constructed to protect a village road about 1800m along a stream from flood water. Failure of any structure is usually not attributable to a single cause but in the present case at the prima-facie, it seems that the wall failed due to heavy flood and backwater in the stream from river Krishna and the improper design criteria. The other principle causes of the failure are found out and the remedial measures have been suggested. In this article, an attempt has been made by the authors to make an unbiased technological analysis of the data available, motivated by a desire to find ways of avoiding past mistakes and not sitting on judgment on them!
