Early warning and dynamics of compound rockslides: lessons learnt from the Brienz/Brinzauls 2023 rockslope failure

Abstract

AbstractPrediction of rockslope dynamic evolution and catastrophic failure remains a fundamental challenge for scientists and practitioners, even though this topic has been studied for decades. Here we report about a case in the Swiss Alps, which has received worldwide attention, not only because a village was evacuated on May 12, 2023, and traffic corridors were progressively closed prior to the slope collapse, but also because this site had been studied and monitored with unprecedented detail during many years before failure. In 2023 the structural and dynamic evolution of the 2 million m3 suspended compound rockslide at Brienz/Brinzauls was closely monitored with diverse ground-based systems and continuously modeled with Voight’s creep law. Substantial deviations from this classical failure model were observed, which are in most cases not related to variations in external driving factors, but diverse internal strength degradation processes. This led to a systematic analysis of Voight’s model uncertainty and the development of an early warning system which includes supplementary early warning parameters to the classical velocity thresholds. We show how to treat the spatial and temporal variations of velocity thresholds and when they reach their applicability limit in a real-time early warning model. The unstable compartment at Brienz/Brinzauls progressively collapsed in the night of June 15, 2023, and generated a series of dry granular flows and rock mass falls, which just stopped at the Brienz settlement boundary.