Geotechnical News December 2010
55
Geo - interest
the Water in the Soil – Part 1
Bill Hodge
Introduction
Professor Alec Skempton of Imperial
College was my external examiner at
the provincial Irish university where I
finished my masters in Soil Mechanics
and Soil Physics in 1963. I remember
being quite scared at the prospect of
being questioned on my thesis by this
British icon. But when it came down to
it, he really only asked me one simple
question: “What is the most important
thing in Soil Mechanics?” My answer
was equally to the point: “Water”, I
said, and couldn’t think of anything
else to add to make my response a bit
longer. I remember him pondering there
and really not bothering to examine me
further. Now, after the forty plus years
of geotechnical practice that has passed
in the meantime I’ve not found a good
reason to change my mind.
The thing that caught my attention
time and time again during my working
years was the power of water, not in the
sense of generating electricity, but how
water was almost always the cause of a
slope failure, and how civil contractors
used dewatering to make unnaturally
steep excavation slopes below the wa-
ter level. But in those intervening years
I also came to realize that I was not at
all sure that we engineers properly un-
derstood how water behaved in soils
under deformation, not to mention dur-
ing earthquake shaking. Neither was I
convinced my engineering colleagues
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