ABSTRACT
Hong Kong is vulnerable to landslides due to its hilly terrain with dense urban development, the presence of a large number of substandard man-made slopes mostly formed before the 1970s without adequate geotechnical input and control, deep weathering profiles and high seasonal rainfall. The Geotechnical Engineering Office (GEO) has been collecting data and conducting annual reviews of rainfall and landslides since the 1980s. In order to retain in-house expertise in landslide investigations (LIs), a small number of landslides continue to be studied by the GEO. The comprehensive and good quality landslide data collected from the systematic LI work have provided a valuable source of information to facilitate the GEO to make major technical advancements. Based on the lessons learnt from LIs, improvements have been made to the slope engineering practice to mitigate small and large-scale failures of engineered slopes.
