The Beauharnois Diversion Canal: challenges associated with landslides during construction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Beauharnois Diversion Canal is a unique civil work in Canada. With a length of over 25 km, it was excavated in the 1930’s in the middle of a soft clay deposit in the Champlain Sea in order to divert most of the discharge of the St. Lawrence River and thus to exploit the huge hydroelectric potential of this river. This channel includes dikes totaling approximately 45 km in length and is used to generate power at the largest run-of-river hydroelectric plant of all the Hydro-Québec facilities. These exceptional dams by their extent incorporated design concepts involving soft clay as foundation and earthfill which could be qualified ground-breaking for their time. This article exposes the relatively widespread dike slope instabilities observed during construction work, at a time when the state of knowledge on Champlain Sea soft clays was not yet mastered. The article presents the approach of Professor Karl V. Terzaghi, who intervened as an expert on this site in 1946. Finally, the stability of these dikes during construction is examined, based on recent soil investigations that have enabled to gain a deeper understanding of the stratigraphy of the clay deposit along both sides of the canal. Beneath the clay crust are the Champlain Sea deposits: ribboned clay, a pinkish clay and a spotted clay. The pinkish clay is characterized by a local increase in undrained shear strength (the hump) and by its thinness, a feature also observed at other locations in Eastern Québec. Stability analyses also take into account the shear strength resistance of the bump and the effect of its position within the clay deposit.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".