Consequence-Based Selection of Design for a Seismic Event for Landfills—An Approach Based on Canadian Dam Association Guidelines

Landfill failures can result in significant economic and environmental impacts (e.g., if geosynthetic barrier systems rupture, gas containment systems leak, and landfill slopes fail), as well as in extreme cases, loss of life (if failure takes place while people are in the downstream footprint). Because earthquake-induced displacements can be a potential failure mode, consideration of such displacements is a regulated landfill design requirement in the United States and Canada. However, state/provincial jurisdictions currently have different guidance on the appropriate size of the design earthquake to be considered, which can sometimes lead to confusion for companies whose operation span several state/provincial jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions are prescriptive (e.g., Washington/Alaska), some leave the decision to the qualified professional (e.g., province of British Columbia), and others have a prescriptive approach based on consequence of failure (e.g., California). These differences reflect an inconsistency in how the risk/consequence of a landfill failure is perceived by the governing jurisdiction, who decides on an acceptable risk for the public at large. In this paper, it is argued that a consequence-based approach is a more rational method to select the size of earthquake appropriate for design of landfills. The approach being proposed is largely based on the Canadian Dam Association’s Dam Safety Guidelines, which uses the anticipated consequence from a hypothetical dam breach to support selection of a design earthquake event. The method assumes that a failure takes place, regardless of the engineering design/controls in place. Based on the anticipated failure consequence, one can classify the landfill into different hazard levels, with each hazard level using an earthquake event of different sizes for design (the higher the hazard classification, the larger the selected earthquake event for design). The consequences used to classify landfill hazards are evaluated for several categories, such as presence of population at risk, potential for loss of life, environmental/cultural loss, and economic loss.

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