Long infrastructures often cross areas with a high probability of landslides, causing eventually serious problems to the serviceability and compromising safety. The identification and prediction of hazardous zones are difficult, especially for what concerning rockfalls, as they can occur quickly and suddenly. In order to assess rockfall hazard, detailed data such as slope geometry, geotechnical and geomechanical properties of materials, drainage system pattern, etc. are needed. Even though thematic datasets are available and easily downloadable for the majority of the Italian territory, their scale is not adequate and ad-hoc input data must be gathered. An original multi-disciplinary procedure (GEO4) has been developed by the authors based on a mobile mapping system (ARCHITA) integrated with Airborne Lidar and ILI (In-Line Inspections), geomatics, geological models, geotechnical-geomechanical characterization and geomorphometric approach. A Spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis (SMCA) is then used to create a composed and spatially distributed index of landslide hazard based on normalized values of triggering factors. Such index is used to identify and classify the morphological unstable element along the infrastructure, supporting decision-makers in defining the most appropriate mitigation measures and planning their implementation in a clearer, more repeatable and more objective orientated-way. The presented method has been successfully applied so far to hundreds of km of railway lines in Italy.
Catastrophic events as landslides can significantly impact society, in term of endangering lives, affecting human activities and infrastructures operativity. To face these issues, it’s fundamental having tools that can allow proper management and identification of the risk due to their potential manifestation. The following approach has been mainly developed in the context of the Italian Railway Authority (RFI - Rete Ferroviaria Italiana). On many Italian railway lines, one of the biggest issues for the safety of the operations is hydrogeological instability; even small volumes of rock or debris on the track can cause train derailment [1] [2].