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Rain-triggered slope failure of the railway embankment at Malda, India

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Abstract

The common slope stability analysis is incapable of accurately forecasting shallow slides where suction pressures play a critical role. This realization is used for elaborate stability analyses which include soil suction to better predict rainfall-induced slides at railway embankment at Malda where three known cases of slope failures and train derailments occurred after heavy rainfall. The relationship between the soil–water content and the matric suction is established for the embankment soil. It is then used in the coupled analyses of seepage and slope stability to estimate performances of the embankment at different intensity and duration of rainfall. The numerical simulations are performed with the FE code Geo-Studio. The numerical results show significant reduction in the factor of safety of the railway embankment with the increase in the intensity and duration of rainfall. The effectiveness of the proposed mitigation measures including placement of 2 m-wide free draining rockfill across the slopes and drilling 5-m-long sheet pile wall at the toe of the embankment is studied numerically. The study confirms that the proposed mitigation measures effectively increase the factor of safety of the embankment and stabilizing it even in case of a heavy rainfall of 25 mm/h over 12 h.

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  1. Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, India

    Monal Raj & Aniruddha Sengupta

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  1. Monal Raj
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  2. Aniruddha Sengupta
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Correspondence to Aniruddha Sengupta.

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Raj, M., Sengupta, A. Rain-triggered slope failure of the railway embankment at Malda, India. Acta Geotech. 9, 789–798 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-014-0345-9

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