Civil and environmental engineering professor Scott Brandenberg is the senior author on a paper recognized with the 2022 Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The paper presents a novel mechanism for seismic failure of levees founded on peaty organic soil, as encountered for example in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region of California. Co-recipients of the award are CEE alumni Anne Lemnitzer (MS ’07, Ph.D. ’09), associate professor at UC Irvine and first author of the paper, and Samuel Yneista (MS ’12, Ph.D. ’16), assistant professor at Polytechnique Montréal, along with Riccardo Cappa.
Established in 1955, the Middlebrooks Award honors annually a paper for especially outstanding contributions in the field of geotechnical engineering.
The paper is titled “Settlement Rate Increase in Organic Soils Following Cyclic Loading” and was published in the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering. Using a combination of novel testing methods and analysis, the paper shows that settlement rates of levees on peaty organic soil accelerate following severe earthquake shaking. This is an important finding that could threaten levees that are vital infrastructure in California’s complex water distribution system.
The paper was produced as part of a long-term research effort by Brandenberg, fellow civil and environmental engineering professor Jonathan Stewart, and multiple students and postdoctoral scholars to characterize seismic hazard and risk in the Delta region of California. The research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the California Department of Water Resources. This work is of vital importance to the State of California because the probability of massive, simultaneous breaching of levees due to earthquake loading is high. This represents a significant hazard to the Delta region itself, but also threatens water delivery through the California Water Project, which provides more than 40% of Southern California’s water supply.
Please click the following link to read the article “Settlement Rate Increase in Organic Soils Following Cyclic Loading”: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%29GT.1943-5606.0002432