Filipino, American engineers create landslide peril mapping for RP

By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

A FILIPINO engineer who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and her former civil engineering professor have devised a new and potentially effective mapping system of landslide perils of mountainous areas in the Philippines.

The landslide hazard mapping system determines an area’s landslide risks that could be used to improve building codes, zoning policies and disaster mitigation processes in a country that is hit by powerful yearly typhoons.

MIT Civil Engineer Professor Herbert Einstein and his former student Filipina Artessa Saldivar-Sali developed the new system with the northern mountain city of Baguio being its first test subject particularly due to its location and high level of precipitation.

Baguio is almost always at high risk for landslides due constant heavy rainfall. The risks could be higher as population continues to boom in the mountain city and there is still continuous illegal logging, slash-and-burn farming, and blasting due to mining and road construction.

Saldivar-Sali is listed in the University of the Philippines Diliman Engineering Department website as one of its faculty members teaching geotechnical engineering. She holds an undergraduate degree in civil engineering from UP Diliman, then took her graduate studies on Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT.

Saldivar, according to Einstein, visits Baguio City often with her family and developed the system as part of her master’s degree thesis work.

Einstein said their hazard rating system works by using information on the history of landslides, the type of bedrock and the inclination of a slope, as well as the indigenous vegetation that can be factors in causing or preventing landslides.

An important part of Einstein and Saldivar-Sali’s hazard rating system is also land use and population density.

“The system could be applied directly to any country with similar topography, geology and climate, which would be much of Southeast Asia,” Einstein said.

Saldivar-Sali said in her statement that some of her findings were “counter-intuitive” such that some obvious variables did not actually cause landslides. “What we found didn’t follow any kind of predictable pattern. The conclusion we reached is that the landslide hazard is determined by a combination of two factors: the underlying bedrock and the slope,” she said.

Saldivar-Sali used limestone as an example, wherein the rock are formed in steep slopes, which actually gives it stability. “So the steep slope is the stable condition for this rock.” Saldivar-Sali, who is currently working on her doctorate degree for building technology in MIT, said the landslide mapping system would be applied in Southeast Asian countries where new building code requirements can be adopted.

She also stressed that a landslide mapping system can produce mitigation measures, such as stabilizing streams and river channels, controlled blasting for civil works construction in mountain sites, as well as reforestation in high-hazard areas.

MIT’s story on Einstein and Saldivar-Sali’s can be found on their website.

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