Assessment of geomatics engineering techniques for landslides investigations for traffic safety

Abstract

Geomatics engineering (GIS, GPS, Remote sensing, and photogrammetry) offers a lower cost and faster prediction of the threat of landslides to road traffic safety. They reduce the cost and the time needed for the monitoring of the active sliding land areas around the highways. The objective is to assess the potential of geomatics engineering in deciding slope failure occurrence after landslide to insure traffic safety. Several types of geomatics data (GPS, Photogrammetry, high resolution satellite images) will be used to predict the threat of landslides on the highway.Landslides around the highways lead to dangerous accidents, significant economic loss and disruption of traffic flow. As a case study, we considered unstable area with continuous landslides where a major highway is traversing and suffers from yearly disruption and accidents due to landslides. An area around the North Highway (Amman-Jerash highway) which connects the capital Amman to three important governorates Irbid, Jerash and Ajloun was studied and analysed using Geomatics engineering techniques to predict its stability after land slide. This highway traverses a mountainous area with repeated unpredicted dangerous landslides after the rainy season. Landslides cause tremendous problems to this artery highway and sometimes corrupt traffic for months. The late landslides occurred in 2017 and 2019 caused massive destruction and disruption of the traffic flow.For the sake of comparison with the used classical methods, the results of land stability detection obtained from geomatics processing were compared with those obtained by the classical methods (based on field and laboratory works). The results (obtained from the use of geomatics techniques) completely agreed with the geo-technique, geologic and water studies using data obtained from the Ministry of Public Works and Housing (MPWH). As a result, Geomatics techniques provided the same detection results faster and at lower cost.