Preventing landslides on roads and railways: a new risk-based approach

Much of the world's road and railway network is built on embankments or in cuttings and thus susceptible to disruption from landslides—particularly in wet weather. Although rapid repair of landslide damage is well within modern civil engineering capabilities, the economic consequences of severing a major transport artery for even a short period can far outweigh the remedial costs. Ideally landslides should be prevented from occurring in the first place, but that requires a sea change in approach. This paper reports on an innovative risk-based system for managing landslide prevention on a 116 km highway in Malaysia. In the four years since it was implemented, maintenance costs have nearly halved and landslides are becoming rarer events.