Mechanism of failure of the Mount Polley Tailings Storage Facility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 4 August 2014, a breach developed in a portion of the embankment at the Mount Polley Tailings Storage Facility following foundation failure. This paper explores the mechanism of this progressive failure in view of pronounced three-dimensional stability effects identified in this slope. The findings of a three-dimensional deformation analysis of this failure are reported. The results demonstrate that its initiation can be explained in terms of minor strain-weakening within a thin shear band in the glaciolacustrine unit at the base of this slide, combined with the delayed mobilization of shear resistance in the shell zone owing to its relative ductility, along with the reduction in the levels of mobilized shear resistance in the upstream region of the slide resulting from a loss of confinement and (or) failure in extension caused by the translational displacements the base of the side. While recognizing the limitations of analyses alone, simulation suggests that strain localization in a shear band with a thickness not exceeding 12–13 cm is requisite for the initiation of this failure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".