Dynamic analysis and numerical modeling of the 2015 catastrophic landslide of the construction waste landfill at Guangming, Shenzhen, China

Since lots of underground and slope excavation works were conducted during the urbanization process, an increasing number of sites in ravines around a city have been used to stockpile a large amount of excavated soils. This brings a huge challenge for researchers and managers in the risk evaluation and mitigation of potential dangers of these man-made construction waste landfills. This paper describes a recently large landslide of the construction waste landfill, which occurred at a site of Guangming new district in Shenzhen, China, on December 20, 2015. This catastrophic landslide caused the death of 69 persons and 8 persons are still missing. In this paper, this landslide was numerically simulated and analyzed. In spite of neither high-intensity rainfall nor antecedent rainfall, a slope of this landfill with a relative height of 111 m sided and caused about 2.34 million cubic meters of the soils to travel over a gentle terrain more than 1.2 km. This means that the landslide mobility index (H/L = 0.092) is much lower than a general designed value and the values in most other cases. A depth-integrated continuum method and a MacCormack-TVD finite difference algorithm are adopted, in this paper, to numerically simulate the dynamic process of this large landslide. It is found that a Coulomb friction model with consideration of the pore water pressure effects can well reproduce the main characteristics of the dynamic process of this landslide. Sensitivity analysis has demonstrated that the high pore water pressure in the soils plays a significant role in its mobility and is a key factor to the severity of this landslide.