Debris flow impact assessment caused by 14 April 2012 rainfall along the Al-Hada Highway, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia using
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Debris flow impact assessment caused by 14 April 2012 rainfall along the Al-Hada Highway, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia using high-resolution satellite imagery Ahmed M. Youssef & Biswajeet Pradhan & Norbert H. Maerz
Received: 30 December 2012 / Accepted: 15 March 2013 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2013
Abstract The Al-Hada highway that descends towards the west of the city of At-Taif is a major connecting highway in the western part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is one of the series of descending roads connecting the holy city of Makkah and the city of Jeddah with the city of At-Taif and the cities farther south along the escarpment. The length of the Al-Hada highways is about 22 km. The Al-Hada highway has been historically exposed to landslides and other geohazards since the day it was opened to public some 60 years ago. The road has been reconstructed and many slope instabilities have been remediated and the road has been expanded to two lanes in each direction. Heavy rainfalls occurred on the 14th of April 2012 in the province of At-Taif, causing huge debris flows in two places along the Al-Hada highway. As a result of that, these debris flows A. M. Youssef Geology Department, Faculty of Science, Sohag University, Sohag, Egypt A. M. Youssef (*) Geological Hazards Department, Applied Geology Section, Saudi Geological Survey, P.O. Box 54141, Jeddah 21514, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia e-mail: [email protected] B. Pradhan (*) Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University Putra Malaysia, 43400, UPM, Serdang, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] B. Pradhan e-mail: [email protected] N. H. Maerz Geological Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO 65409-0660, USA
closed all four lanes of the highway for 2 weeks in order to remove the debris. The current research deals with mapping of all debris flows along Al-Hada highway and determining their volumes and their impact on the road. Finally, suitable solutions have been suggested to address these critical sites to minimize and/or avoid the debris flow hazards in the future. Keywords Debris flow . Landslide . Geographic information systems (GIS) . Remote sensing . Volume estimation . Mitigation methods . KSA
Introduction The Al-Hada escarpment road, which descends from the top of the escarpment near the city of Al-Hada down to the police checkpoint near the village of Kara, was one of the first roads constructed through the extremely difficult mountainous terrain. It connects the Red Sea coastal plain and its low-lying hinterland with the towns and the cities east of the top of the escarpment. It is an important road, as it offers private vehicles and light-duty trucks convenient access between the Holy City of Makkah and the metropolis of Jeddah, both below the escarpment, and the city of At-Taif and large towns and villages southeastwards, above the escarpment. It is located in the mountainous area covered between the southern and eastern parts of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) (Fig. 1). The Al
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