Real-time monitoring and early warning of landslides at relocated Wushan Town, the Three Gorges Reservoir, China

Abstract

A special monitoring and warning system has been established and improved in the Three Gorges Reservoir area since 1999. It is necessary to develop a real-time monitoring system on landslides because there are dense populations centered in the reservoir area and geo-hazards may be triggered by a 30-m water level fluctuation between 145 and 175 m in elevation during reservoir operation; the regular monitoring could not be suitable to the early warning on landslides. Since 2003, the authors have carried out a real-time monitoring and early warning project on landslides at the relocated Wushan town in the Three Gorges Reservoir area. The monitoring station includes Global Positioning System with high-accuracy double frequency to monitor ground displacement, time domain reflection technology, and immobile borehole, inclinometer to monitor deep displacement, piezometer to monitor pore water pressure, and precipitation and reservoir water level monitoring. Compared with traditional methods, the real-time monitoring is continuous and traceable in the acquisition process, and the cycle of data acquisition is very short, usually within hours, minutes, or even shorter. Based on the landslide monitoring experience at the Three Gorges Reservoir area, the early warning criteria on landslide are established in which the critical situation is classified into four levels: blue, yellow, orange, and red, respectively, expressed by no, slight, moderate, and high risk situation. Comprehensive judgment from multimonitoring data of Yuhuangge landslide in this area since 2004 suggested that the new Wushan town will be at the blue early warning level, although some monitoring data of individual displacement at deep borehole showed that the displacement was increased by 5 mm in 5 months with an average velocity of 1.0 mm/month, and the data of BOTDR also showed an obvious dislocation along a stairway on the landslide.