In mountain terrains of Himalaya, road and highway networks play a vital role in remote areas for transportation, public network and all kind of socio-economic activities. The stability of rock slopes along the roads and highways is a major concern in these hilly regions. Any kind of slope failure may lead to disruption in traffic, loss of properties and lives/injuries as well as environmental degradation. The unplanned excavations of rock slopes for construction or widening purposes may undermine the stability of the slopes. The present study incorporates the stability analysis of road cut slopes along NH-109 which goes to holy shrine of Kedarnath. Slope failure is not only a phenomenon of rainy season but it has also been encountered even in dry season. The study area experiences high vehicular traffic especially from March to August due to pilgrims since it is the only road to Kedarnath. The distance of about 20 km between Rudraprayag and Agastmuni has been investigated. The continuous slope mass rating (CSMR) technique has been used for slope stability analysis at five different locations. CSMR is modification of original slope mass rating (SMR) proposed by Romana which is based on well established rock mass rating (RMR) technique. Kinematic analysis was also carried out to evaluate these sites for types of failure and its potential failure directions. The potentially vulnerable sites were identified. The results indicate that the CSMR technique may be exploited to assess the stability of rock slopes in the Himalayan territory

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Rockfall is a major problem in high hill slopes and rocky mountainous regions and construction of highways at these rockfall prone areas often require stable slopes. The causes of rockfall are presence of discontinuities, high angle cut slopes, heavy rainfall, and unplanned slope geometry etc. Slope geometry is one of the most triggering parameters for rockfall, when there are variations in slope angle along the profile of slope. The Present study involves rockfall hazard assessment of road cut slopes for 15 km distance starting from Mahabaleshwar town along State Highway-72 (SH-72). The vertical to subvertical cut slopes are prone to instability due to unfavorable orientation of discontinuities in slope face of weathered and altered basaltic rockmass. The predominant type of instability has been found as wedge type failure involving medium to large size blocks. In order to investigate the existing stability conditions, analyses were carried out at two locations under different slope conditions. The kinematic analysis was performed using stereographic projection method. RockFall 4.0 numerical simulator software was used to calculate the maximum bounce heights, total kinetic energies and translational velocities of the falling rockmass blocks, and a comparative analysis is presented with increasing the mass of blocks and height of the slope. The result of numerical analysis shows that varying slope angle geometry creates more problems as compared to the mass of blocks in the scenario of rockfall.

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Construction of railways, highways and roads around steep slopes is a challenging assignment and require special investigations by geologists and geotechnical engineers that help to identify critical slopes. Rockfall Hazard Rating System for India (RHRSI) is a modified scheme for Indian subcontinent and used to define overall stability of slopes in mountainous region or rock cut slopes. Once this rating system identifies critical zones, proper protection measures can be applied to prevent rockfalls. In this article, RHRSI is adopted to identify slopes, prone to rockfalls so that proper preventive measure can be proposed to mitigate loss. State Highway-72 (SH-72) connecting Poladpur to Mahabaleshwar, is an important transportation corridor supporting high vehicle traffic within the wellknown tourist area is chosen for rockfall hazard rating. Field observations show that up to 15 km corridor from Mahabaleshwar town has frequent rockfall problems with two most rockfall locations situated at about 12 and 6 km from Mahabaleshwar town. Also, an attempt has been made to focus on riskconsequence analysis for rockfall locations. To this aim, the RHRSI is applied to SH-72 corridor on two locations which are identified as very prone to rockfall hazard.

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