Recently, human and property damages have often occurred due to various reasons—such as landslides, debris flow, and other sediment-related disasters—which are also caused by regional torrential rain resulting from climate change and reckless development of mountainous areas. Debris flows mainly occur in mountainous areas near urban living communities and often cause direct damages. In general, debris flows containing soil, rock fragments, and driftwood temporarily travel down to lower parts along with a mountain torrent. However, debris flows are also often reported to stream down from the point where a slope failure or a landslide occurs in a mountain directly to its lower parts. The impact of those debris flows is one of the main factors that cause serious damage to structures. To mitigate such damage of debris flows, a quantitative assessment of the impact force is thus required. Moreover, technologies to evaluate disaster prevention facilities and structures at disaster-prone regions are needed. This study developed two models to quantitatively analyze the damages caused by debris flows on structures: Type-1 model for calculating the impact force, which reflected the flow characteristics of debris flows and the Type-2 model, which calculated the impact force based on the topographical characteristics of mountainous regions. Using RAMMS a debris flow runoff model, the impact forces assessed through Type-1 and Type-2 models were compared to check reliability. Using the assessed impact forces, the damage ratio of the structures was calculated and the amount of damage caused by debris flows on the structures was ultimately assessed. The results showed that the Type-1 model overestimated the impact force by 10% and the Type-2 model by 4% for Mt. Umyeon in Seoul, compared to the RAMMS model. In addition, the Type-1 model overestimated the impact force by 3% and Type-2 by 2% for Mt. Majeok in Chuncheon, South Korea.
A geophysical survey was undertaken at Wiri area of the Andong in southeastern Korea to delineate subsurface structure and to detect the fault zone, which affected the 1997 mountain-hill subsidence and subsequent road heaving initiated by the intense rainfall. Electrical resistivity methods of dipole-dipole array profiling and Schlumberger array sounding and seismic methods of refraction and reflection profiling were used to map a clay zone, which was regarded as the major factor for the landslide. The clay zone was identified in electrical resistivity and seismic sections as having low electrical resistivity (\100 Xm) and low seismic velocity (\400 m/s), respectively. The clay zone detected by using geophysical methods is well correlated with its distribution from the trench and drill-core data. The results of the electrical and seismic surveys showed that slope subsidence was associated with the sliding of saturated clay along a fault plane trending NNW-SSE and dipping 10°-20°S W. However, the road heaving was caused by the slope movement of the saturated clay along a sub-vertical NNEtrending fault.
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