Abstract
The Wenchuan earthquake occurred at 2:28 pm local time on May 12, 2008 near the west edge of the Sichuan Basin in China. During the earthquake, local transportation in the area was substantially damaged. An embankment slope at K439 + 450 ~ + 680 in Baoji-Chengdu railway collapsed due to the intense near field ground motion. This paper presents the local geological and environmental conditions of the embankment landslide. Embankment material properties were determined through field investigations and laboratory tests. Static and pseudo-static analyses were performed to acquire a quantitative assessment of the embankment stability. The failure mode of the embankment was investigated through fully coupled nonlinear dynamic analyses. The results show that the failure surface obtained by limit equilibrium method was deeper than observed. The failure surface obtained by fully coupled dynamic response analysis agreed well with the post-failure observations, but the maximum permanent displacement was almost five times than those observed.
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