Design, Construction, and Performance of a Highway Embankment Failure Repaired with Tire-Derived Aggregate

In July 2006, a large embankment failure occurred during construction of a four-lane divided highway leading to the Canada-U.S. border crossing in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada. The highway embankment was approximately 12.3 m in height, just short of the design height of 14 m, when it failed. The cause of the failure was attributed to the rapid rate of construction and the intensity of loading on low-strength foundation soils, consisting of up to 15 m of soft marine clay. The reconstruction effort used 1.4 million scrap tires to create the tire-derived aggregate (TDA) as lightweight fill. TDA was placed within the new embankment, constructed over the site of the original failure. An important element to the design was the installation of geotechnical instrumentation, which allowed an observational approach to be taken during the construction process. This approach resulted in modifications to the original design throughout the process of reconstructing the TDA embankment. This paper presents the resu...