ASCE invites you to the joint February Section meeting with the Minnesota Geotechnical Society, Geo-Institute Chapter. MGS-GI and the University of Minnesota are hosting their annual Geotechnical Engineering Conference, and all ASCE members are welcome to attend the dinner and Kersten Lecture on February 17th at the St. Paul Student Center. Dr. Vernon Schaefer, PE will be presenting Catastrophic Landslides: My Journey to Vaiont and Guinsaugan. Tickets are $30 for ASCE members, $5 for students, and $40 for non-members.
Catastrophic landslides are violent disturbances of nature, often very sudden in nature, and causing massive physical damage and loss of life. Two infamous landslides will be described, both which occurred suddenly and lasted only minutes, yet caused enormous damage and loss of life. The first occurred in 1963 when the side of a mountain slide rapidly into the Vaiont Reservoir in Italy, causing a flood wave to overtop the dam and killing some 2000 people. The presenter will draw on a visit to Vaiont in 2003 during the 40th anniversary remembrance of the disaster. The second is the Guinsaugan landslide of February 2006 in which a mountain side gave way in Southern Leyte in the Philippines killing between 1500 and 3000 people as several villages were covered. The presenter was part of the U.S. reconnaissance team that visited Guinsaugan in 2006 and 2007. Along with technical details of the landslides, an emphasis on the human-interest aspects of the aftermath and investigations of the landslides will be discussed.
Speaker Bio
Vernon R. Schaefer, Ph.D. P.E.
Vern Schaefer is a professor of civil engineering at Iowa State University. He received his B.S.in civil engineering from South Dakota State University, a M.S. in geotechnical engineering from Iowa State University and a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech. Dr. Schaefer began his academic career at the University of New Mexico and after two years moved back to his alma mater, South Dakota State University, where he spent 15 years working his way through the academic ranks, eventually being named Department Head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. In 2004 he was named the inaugural James M. Hoover Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at ISU. His research interests cover the breadth of geotechnical engineering and include landslides and slope stability, foundation engineering, earth retention systems, engineering behavior of overconsolidated clays and clay shales, glacial till permeability, water and contaminant migration in fractured soils, geotechnical aspects of pavement systems, and numerical modeling geotechnical engineering phenomena and systems. Dr. Schaefer currently serves as the principal investigator and project manager on a four year, $3,000,000 Strategic Highway Research Program project on Geotechnical Solutions for Transportation Infrastructure, one of the largest geotechnical engineering research projects in the country. The project is focused primarily on ground improvement techniques for improving geotechnical transportation systems. The project is a collaborative effort between three universities and six consulting engineers.
Please join us for a night of learning and networking! PDH certificates will be available.