Numerous quarries, active and abandoned, have been excavated all over Greece. Based on the practices of the past, most of these quarries were excavated close to the construction activity, thus near expanding cities or major transportation axes. The gradual incorporation of the abandoned quarries into the cities generated the need for change of their usage to be environmentally compatible. The land-planning development of the sites without taking into consideration the geotechnical characteristics of the slopes led to the incorrect selection of the new use or to the misplacement of infrastructure. The main purpose of this paper is to present the geotechnical problems that occurred at constructed facilities and to analyse the influence of correct land-planning design on the reduction of rock fall hazard and the cost of slope support measures.
The problems arising from the unsuitable land-planning design of facilities in abandoned quarries are presented by means of case studies from the Athens urban environment. Most of the data are from the case study of the stability problems of the slopes surrounding the infrastructure of the Attiko Alsos Park, constructed in the abandoned quarries of the Turkovounia hill. To highlight that the problems at Attiko Alsos Park are not atypical, two other old quarry sites are briefly reviewed.
The mountainous areas of the Greek dominion are occupied by many occasionally inhabitable villages that were deserted because of the fact that they were founded on areas affected by landslides. Many of those villages, during the last years, were reconstructed and their houses were turned into occasionally inhabitable country houses. The proposed support and protection measures for the reconstruction of those villages must follow the rules of the rational management of the financial sources. The construction of expensive retaining structures in order to protect deserted houses or building sites of insignificant value is inexcusable. In those cases the geological studies must precede all reconstruction activities. Those studies can provide detailed guide-lines in order to prevent the reactivation of the landslides and/or to reduce the implications in case of reactivation. Also, the geological studies can determine the necessary combination of the protection and support measures capable to block the preparatory and the triggering causal factors of the sliding movements. This way, the cost of the applied measures reduces to acceptable levels, compatible to the occasional use of those villages. Petroxori village (Argithea district, Karditsa prefecture) is a typical example of a village constructed on an unstable area that generated several geotechnical problems. The evaluation of those problems and the presentation of the proposed measures can be a useful reference for the confrontation of similar situations
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