Many of these reports are prepared by NSF-sponsored researchers currently working in Japan. These reports provide information for use by the global science and engineering community. Mr. Liedtke was a participant in the 1997 Summer Institute sponsored by NSF and the Science and Technology Agency of Japan. Professor Ikuo Tohata of the Geotechnical Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Tokyo hosted Mr. Liedtke. The failure of a man-made river embankment can be a problem for areas lying below the elevation of the river.
Seismic activity is one possible source of embankment failure.
A method to retrofit embankments to minimize the potential of failure is proposed. The effectiveness of this proposed method is being investigated by experiments performed on soil models. A large shake table is used to simulate seismic events on the models. During an earthquake embankments may fail. In particular if the embankment was constructed on top of a loose deposit of saturated sand, failure may occur due to the decrease in the effective stress of the sand deposit that can occur during an earthquake.