Much of the world's road and railway network is built on embankments or in cuttings and thus susceptible to disruption from landslides—particularly in wet weather. Although rapid repair of landslide damage is well within modern civil engineering capabilities, the economic consequences of severing a major transport artery for even a short period can far outweigh the remedial costs. Ideally landslides should be prevented from occurring in the first place, but that requires a sea change in approach. This paper reports on an innovative risk-based system for managing landslide prevention on a 116 km highway in Malaysia. In the four years since it was implemented, maintenance costs have nearly halved and landslides are becoming rarer events.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.