The impacts of rock discontinuities to housing development

Abstract

This report documents the impacts of rock discontinuities in a housing development project involving rock slope stability and foundation engineering. It was investigated that rock discontinuities have significant impacts to housing development project. It was also studied that current site investigation technique in identifying the dips of exposed rocks are not reliable. Additionally, it was found out that local design engineers did not use the site investigation results, such as borehole televiewer, in their design. Instead, engineers always assume rock discontinuities exist in any directions and to be fully persistent. Although there have been development in local geotechnical engineering practice over the past 40 years, local guidelines in suggesting assumptions for rocks and methodology in assessing rock slope stability are lacking or inadequate. This may result in over-conservative assumptions made on rock masses.