Overviews of Failure Mode and Reconstruction of Road Traffic Facilities in Wenchuan Earthquak-stricken Areas

Overviews of Failure Mode and Reconstruction of Road Traffic Facilities in Wenchuan Earthquak-stricken Areas

2011 International Conference of Environmental Science and Engineering

On 12 May 2008, the devastating magnitude 8.0 (Wenchuan, Sichuan Province) struck the Longmen Shan and neighboring region, which are located at the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau and the western Sichuan basin in China. In the earthquake-stricken areas, road traffic facilities, especially bridge structures, were also destroyed heavily under the action of seismic waves. Because the secondary geological disaster of Wenchuan events were also serious, how to analyze damage modes of highway traffic facilities scientifically and organize rebuilding of transportation and construction of emergency road network in the earthquake-stricken areas have become an urgent topic to decisionmakers and engineers. According to geological structure and seismic features, damage modes of highway traffic facilities were analysed, and restoration and reconstruction of transportation would be characterized by its long-running works. It is concluded from the field investigations that the wrecked pavements in the seismic region are with extrusion and tenso-shear failure characteristics, and the destroyed side slopes of roadbed have the wrecking modes which collapse on the coseismic responses or damage because of the secondary geological disaster, and the destroyed bridges are characterized by abutment subsidence, piers damage, impact extrusion damage, bridge span damage and so on. In accordance with the damage modes of highway traffic facilities above, some attentive problems about the road traffic restoration and reconstruction of the earthquake-stricken areas are preliminarily discussed.