Consequence-Based Selection of Design for a Seismic Event for Landfills—An Approach Based on Canadian Dam Association Guidelines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".