3rd Charles C. Ladd Memorial Lecture

Third Charles C. Ladd Memorial Lecture
Geotechnical Lessons Re-learnt from Hong Kong Airport Extension

Thursday, November 21, 2019 
Tufts University, 40 Talbot Avenue, Medford, 02153
5:30 PM Social/Registration at Tufts Alumnae Lounge, 6:30 Presentation at Cohen Auditorium 

Speaker:
Dr. David W. Hight
Senior Consultant and Founding Director, Geotechnical Consulting Group

Synopsis:

The lecture will describe a focused and closely supervised ground investigation, along the lines of the Bothkennar Study, at the site of the extension to Hong Kong International Airport, a large land reclamation project founded on marine clays. A re-examination of the site was proposed because of anomalies in the performance of adjacent and ongoing reclamations. The investigation revealed that the marine clays supporting the reclaimed land are microstructured, like many natural clays around the world, so that observed settlement behaviour deviated significantly from predictions that did not account for this structural phenomenon. The implications of this finding on the predicted performance of the reclamation are discussed. The reasons why the extensive earlier ground investigations missed this key finding are identified and presented as lessons relearnt, and guidance provided on avoiding such oversights is presented.

Speaker:
Dr. David Hight is a Senior Consultant and Founding Director of the Geotechnical Consulting Group in London. He has vast experience in both industry and academia. He was a lecturer at Imperial College London (1975-1983), Visiting Professor at Imperial College (1993-2012), the National University of Singapore (2000) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1983). He has published widely on the subjects of soil behaviour, offshore geotechnics, soil sampling, laboratory testing, stability problems, earthworks and foundations. He delivered the 38th Rankine Lecture in 1998. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2001 and he was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Registration Deadline: 15 November 2019
Free to Members, Students, and Non-members

Information/Registration: 
Register to attend this lecture at 3rd CCL Lecture 2019.  For questions regarding this event, contact Lucy Jen at Lucy.Jen@Tufts.edu or 617.642.0502.