A Preliminary Work of Safety Potential Analysis Model for Anchors Used on Freeway Slopes

In Taiwan, the landforms are mainly dominated by mountains and hills. Thus, countless road sections of the freeways are impossible to avoid the state-of-the-practice problems such as slope cutting. In order to stabilize the freeway slope, ground anchor technique is often employed to improve the stability of cut slope. With the increasing service time of ground anchors, their performance on the freeway slopes is highly required to be assessed. There were many disasters on freeway anchored slopes in recent years, so ground anchor inspection has also received attention to a great extent. This paper introduces the concept of safety potential analysis and then utilizes the proposed model for an anchored slope. Specifically, the proposed safety potential analysis collects plain map, historical slope inspections, monitoring data, ground anchor inspections and maintenance practices, as well as further use the geographic information system to establish the proposed model. Finally, this paper provides the predicted result from safety potential analysis and suggests the dangerous area of the studied anchored slope to the government authorities for immediately response purpose.