Los Angeles has experienced ground deformations during the past decades. These ground displacements can be destructive for infrastructure and can reduce the land capacity for groundwater storage. Therefore, this paper seeks to evaluate the existing ground displacement patterns along a new metro tunnel in Los Angeles, known as the Sepulveda Transit Corridor. The goal is to find the most crucial areas suffering from subsidence or uplift and to enhance the previous reports in this metropolitan area. For this purpose, we applied a Persistent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar using 29 Sentinel-1A acquisitions from June 2017 to May 2018 to estimate the deformation rate. The assessment procedure demonstrated a high rate of subsidence in the Inglewood field that is near the study area of the Sepulveda Transit Corridor with a maximum deformation rate of 30 mm/yr. Finally, data derived from in situ instruments as groundwater level variations, GPS observations, and soil properties were collected and analyzed to interpret the results. Investigation of geotechnical boreholes indicates layers of fine-grained soils in some parts of the area and this observation confirms the necessity of more detailed geotechnical investigations for future constructions in the region. Results of investigating line-of-sight displacement rates showed asymmetric subsidence along the corridor and hence we proposed a new framework to evaluate the asymmetric subsidence index that can help the designers and decision makers of the project to consider solutions to control the current subsidence.

Background Through a new systematic perspective, the HSE-integrated management system attempts to examine the relationships between safety, health and environment. The purpose of this system is to provide a coordinated, comprehensive and precautionary assessment of the issues and incidents within concrete plants.Methods In addition to a life cycle assessment (LCA) of concrete through air pollutant emissions in this study, the extraction and monitoring of pollutant from three concrete plants in the city of Mashhad are carried out via fieldwork. In the present study, a number of factors such as the extent and time of exposure to each pollutant are estimated using the meta-heuristic genetic algorithm approach (GA) in order to create the desirable risk rate (risk rate ≤ 3).Results The results of life cycle assessment indicate the production of 348 kg Carbon Dioxide (CO 2 ) per cubic meter of concrete processing. However, in addition to its environmental effects, CO 2 in concentrations of more than 5000 ppm may cause asphyxiation as well as epidemiologic effects on the staff. Conclusion The results of the study show that in order to reduce the risks of developing chronic diseases such as lung cancer, the staff in cement processing sector must be exposed to a period of at most 3.5 h for each 8-h work interval.

Desalination is set to become a major source of drinking water in several Middle Eastern countries over the coming decades. Solar distillation is a simple power-independent method of water desalination, which can be carried out in active or passive modes. This study is among the first attempts to investigate the possibility of desalinating brackish groundwater resources under the threat of saltwater intrusion in the southern areas of Razavi Khorasan province in Iran. For this purpose, a pilot solar distillation unit was constructed to analyze the effects of the unit orientation, depth of the water pool, atmospheric conditions, input salinity, and flow continuity on the solar distillation performance. The results showed that the unit exhibited the highest efficiency when it had a 3 cm deep water pool. It was oriented facing southward while operating a continuous flow for at least 3 days under sunny weather conditions. It was found that among the studied parameters, the unit orientation and pool depth had the greatest impact on the water production performance for this type of water desalination system. Conversely, the water production efficiency was not very sensitive to the input salinity level. Overall, the solar distillation technology was able to reduce the salinity by 99.7% and the hardness by 94.7%.

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