Creeping landslides are common in mountainous areas, causing significant damage to buildings and infrastructure. The major difficulty in modelling of these landslides is the inability of laboratory tests to reproduce adequately the macro behaviour in the creeping soil masses. The proposed approach of observation-guided constitutive modelling addresses this issue by considering a creeping landslide as a series of macro elements, where monitoring of displacements and pore water pressures allows the derivation of suitable constitutive models and their parameters. The paper proposes three generalised models describing the behaviour of pore water pressures, sliding layer and slip surface, which can be adapted to fit the observational data. The three models are integrated into the boundary value problem, the solution of which helps to explain the evolution of the landslide and to predict its future behaviour using probabilistic approaches. When applied to the St Moritz-Brattas landslide in Switzerland, the calibrated landslide models proved to be successful in describing the complex behaviour of all three distinctive regions of the landslide. The paper also explores possible ways for predicting the landslide reaction to extreme rains and forecasting the long-term displacement evolution in the vicinity of the Leaning Tower of St Moritz, which will be critical for planning its future stabilisation.

No abstract

Existing buildings embedded in permanently moving landslides often exhibit significant damage. This damage is mostly caused by excessive loads acting on the building due to relative displacements of the landslide. For buildings in the compression zone of a landslide, the existing classical earth pressure and landslide pressure solutions are not capable of describing the loads adequately. In this paper it is shown that accumulated loads acting on a building eventually lead first to a local limit state with failure in the vicinity of the building, followed by a global limit state where the whole sliding body reaches failure. Both limit states are analysed by means of limit analysis, resulting in analytical solutions for the ultimate loads for general cases, and the finite-element method, resulting in the loading history for particular cases. The derived solutions are practically applicable for the assessment and potential retrofitting of existing buildings as well as for the design of new ones, possibly preventing future damage.