Assessment of landslide potential using steady state seepage in unsaturated soils

Abstract

This paper presents a simple method for evaluating potentially unstable soil slopes subject to surface infiltration based on convenient closed-form seepage/stability equations containing slope geometry, soil strength, and infiltration parameters. The method is based on a formulation proposed by Lu and Godt (2008), which provides the change in the factor of safety for a slope subject to steady state infiltration. The key advantage is that no numerical modeling is needed and fairly reasonable factors of safety can be determined. Several case studies are presented to illustrate the potential usefulness of the proposed method.