Simplified procedures are commonly employed to estimate seismic displacements of earth and waste fills. The landmark work of Makdisi and Seed (1978) has been widely adopted in practice. Although this work is widely used, it has a number of significant limitations such as decoupling the sliding block analysis from the seismic response analysis, use of a limited number of recorded earthquake moti...

Lake Oroville is a large artificial lake created by the construction of a 235-mhigh earth dam on the Feather River, California, near the city of Oroville. Its storage capacity is about 4.4 × 109 m 3, and its maximum depth is about 200 m. There was no significant increase in seismic activity in the lake region following impoundment of the dam late in 1967 until the occurrence of many small seism...

Cosmologically motivated theories that explain small acceleration rate of the Universe via modification of gravity at very large, horizon or super-horizon distances, can be tested by precision gravitational measurements at much shorter scales, such as the Earth-Moon distance. Contrary to the naive expectation the predicted corrections to the Einsteinian metric near gravitating sources are so si...

An improved form of a recently derived energetic-statistical formula for size effect on the strength of quasibrittle structures failing at crack initiation is presented and exploited to perform stochastic structural analysis without the burden of stochastic nonlinear finite-element simulations. The characteristic length for the statistical term in this formula is deduced by considering the limi...

The Coralville Reservoir’s capacity is shrinking. Since the dam that created the Reservoir was completed in 1958, approximately 11 percent of the storage basin’s capacity has been lost to silt, said Ron Fournier, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Construction projects, farming — pretty much any time earth is moved, rain will wash away dirt,” he said. “Then streams fill up with ...

The Red Rock Hydroelectric Project converted the existing Dam near Pella, Iowa, from a non-powered dam into multi-purpose dam. flood control was constructed by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in 1960s on Des Moines River Iowa. hydroelectric project developed Western Minnesota Municipal Power Agency and generates up to 55 MW with an average annual energy output 178 gigawatt-hours. new intak...