Mining Engineering Commons^™

Post-Liquefaction Residual Strength Assessment Of The Las Palmas, Chile Tailings Failure, Tristan Reyes Gebhart

Master's Theses

Assessment of post-liquefaction residual strength is needed for the development of empirically-based, predictive correlations for earthquake engineering design. Previous practice commonly assigned negligible strengths to liquefied materials for engineering analysis, producing overly-conservative designs. Increasingly available case history data, and improved analytical tools have allowed for more accurate and less overly-conservative estimation of soil residual strength, improving empirical predictive models. This study provides a new case history to the limited suite of (approximately 30) liquefaction failure case histories available for post-liquefaction in-situ strength predictive correlations.

This case history documents the Las Palmas gold mine tailings dam failure, resulting from seismic-induced liquefaction …