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Geotechnical News • September 2013
27
GEOTECHNICAL INSTRUMENTATION NEWS
and monitoring program becomes
much clearer to all involved.
The full paper is copyrighted by
ASCE, and can be downloaded
for a fee of US$30, from
http://ascelibrary.org/doi/
abs/10.1061/9780784412787.222
Click on the Permalink, then the PDF
tab, scroll to Download Options, Buy
Now. Yes, I appreciate that $30 may
seem a lot, but it’s worth it!
An attitude worth repeating
I included this in GIN five years ago.
Time for a reminder: the great jazz-
master Humphrey Lyttleton (Humph)
died recently. In his own words: “As
we journey through life discarding
baggage on the way, we should keep
an iron grip, to the very end, on the
capacity for silliness. It preserves the
soul from desiccation”. What a won-
derful attitude!
Sheep for monitoring slope
stability
During the few days before the disas-
trous landslide at Vaiont Dam in Italy
in 1963, grazing animals apparently
moved off the future landslide area.
They knew something that humans
didn’t!
In the early 1990s, many large slow-
moving potential landslides were
discovered in the slopes around the
future Clyde reservoir in New Zea-
land. At great expense, geotechnical
monitoring was adopted as an early
warning system for disaster risk
reduction. However, New Zealand
has an enormous number of sheep. I
suggested fencing off the slopes, with
a single small opening in each fence
(ensuring that there were lots of sheep
inside), and installing at each opening
an instrument for counting the rate
of flow of sheep, and automatic data
acquisition systems transmitting to the
office, with trigger levels.
Nobody took me seriously!
Closure
Please send contributions to this
column, or an abstract of an article for
GIN, to me as an e-mail attachment in
MSWord, to john@dunnicliff.eclipse.
co.uk, or by mail: Little Leat, Whis-
selwell, Bovey Tracey, Devon TQ13
9LA, England. Tel. +44-1626-832919.
Cin Cin! (Italy)
Automated MEMS-based In-place Inclinometers
Margaret M. Darrow
Introduction
Inclinometers are used in geotechni-
cal engineering to measure ground
movement. A relatively new form of
inclinometer instrumentation incor-
porates Micro-Electro-Mechanical
Systems (MEMS) accelerometers.
MEMS-based in-place inclinom-
eters (M-IPIs) consist of a series of
accelerometers that are connected
with flexible joints and encased in a
watertight housing. Although these
devices have been evaluated previ-
ously in some areas of the contiguous
US, the author evaluated two different
M-IPIs for their applicability in frozen
ground applications. The overall
research project consisted of four dif-
ferent sites within Alaska. The M-IPI
were installed both vertically and
horizontally, and their measurements
of ground movement and temperature
Figure 1. INC500 modules, staged with centralizers attached and ready for
installation.