Geomechanics and Engineering

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Cost-effective method for reducing local failure of floodwalls verified by centrifuge tests

  • Chung R. Song (University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Prem Paul Research Center) ;
  • Binyam Bekele (Ardaman and Associates, Inc, A Tetra Tech Company) ;
  • Brian D. Sawyer (University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Prem Paul Research Center) ;
  • Ahmed Al-Ostaz (Department of Civil Engineering, University of Mississippi) ;
  • Alexander Cheng (Department of Civil Engineering, University of Mississippi) ;
  • Vanadit-Ellis Wipawi (Centrifuge Research Center, USACE-ERDC)
  • Received : 2022.09.25
  • Accepted : 2023.03.31
  • Published : 2023.04.25
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Abstract

Hurricane Katrina swept New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, in 2005, causing more than 1,000 fatalities and severe damage to the flood protection system. Recovery activities are complete, however, clarifying failure mechanisms and devising resilient and cost-effective retrofitting techniques for the flood protection system are still of utmost importance to enhance the general structural integrity of water retaining structures. This study presents extensive centrifuge test results to find various failure mechanisms and effective retrofitting techniques for a levee system. The result confirmed the rotational failure and translational failure mechanisms for the London Ave. Canal levee and 17th St. Canal levee, respectively. In addition, it found that the floodwalls with fresh waterstop in their joints perform better than those with old/weathered waterstop by decreasing pore water pressure build-up in the levee. Structural caps placed on the top of the joints between I-walls could also prevent local failure by spreading the load to surrounding walls. At the same time, the self-sealing bentonite-sand mixture installed along the riverside of floodwalls could mitigate the failure of floodwalls by blocking the infiltration of seepage water into the gap formed between levee soils and floodwalls.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The authors appreciate the funding received under a subcontract from the Department of Homeland Security-sponsored Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI, Task Order # 4000064428) at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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