Safety of a Constructed Facility: Geotechnical Aspects

An approach is presented to ensure the safety of a constructed facility by outlining, discussing, and illustrating various components of a comprehensive safety program. When dealing with important complex geotechnical facilities, experience clearly shows that the geotechnical profession cannot feasibly create a facility which completely fulfills all performance criteria for the entire life of the facility. Rather, the only logical approach is to engineer a facility for its design life, i.e., create a reasonable design, construct the facility according to the design, and then execute an appropriate ongoing safety program. The comprehensive safety program consists of nine components. These components are described, and several are illustrated, using experience from actual project.