General Public Quiz

Introduction

This module is directed towards members of the general public of Australia, with particular relevance to those interested in the potential impact of landslide events upon themselves, or upon their property.

This module is particularly to provide a broad introduction to the philosophy and concepts embedded within the broad topic of risk management as it applies to landslides within Australia.

This module is applicable to you if you:

Are involved with a building development within a local government area that is prone to landslide events (of one form or another) and are required to have a landslide risk assessment conducted prior to gaining building approval; or
Are adjacent to (beside, above or below) a proposed development which requires a landslide risk assessment prior to its approval, and you are therefore an interested party; or
You are aware of landslide hazards within public property; or
You are interested in the topic in general terms;

The format of this module is a series of questions to step you through the concepts involved in Landslide Risk management (LRM) and to familiarise you with the terminology and jargon that you may encounter.

Instructions

Multiple choice answers are provided. If you are not sure which answer may be correct, then click HINT next and further information will be provided to assist you. You can test your understanding by selecting an answer to see if you are correct or learn why your choice was not. If you chose the correct answer, you can either read the detailed answer or skip to the next question. Each detailed answer provides further links to more resources, such as video explanations, presentations or PDF extracts from guidelines that have been developed by the Australian Geomechanics Society. Further topics are discussed by FAQ pages which pose a series of questions and then give further explanations.

AGS 2007 LRM Guidelines Australian Geoguide

At any time during this module, feel free to launch the guideline PDF’s to research your answers, or simply to give yourself a refresher on Landslide Risk Management.

LRM Guidelines

Question 5 of 10

5. What methods are available to conduct Landslide Risk Assessment?

Qualitative risk assessment.
Quantitative risk assessment.
Guesswork.
Both (A) and (B)

Comprehensive assessment is required and guesswork is not appropriate

5. What methods are available to conduct Landslide Risk Assessment?

Both qualitative and quantitative risk assessment methods.

The choice of assessment method that suits a development will upon the project, and will involve qualitative and quantitative methods are frequently used.

The Australian Geomechanics Society recommends for a conventional residential development that a qualitative assessment for risk-to-property together with a semi-qualitative risk-to-life is a viable and defensible method.

It is fair to say that as a project becomes more substantial, an expectation for increasingly more complex assessments be conducted, such that most infrastructure projects of a substantive nature would be expected to have qualitative analyses conducted only.

Quantitative assessments are generally adopted for large infrastructure projects where the expenditure in the assessment can be justified financially. The data collection and analysis can be conducted under this scenario.

First approach must always be development of an understanding of the slope forming processes — which means a knowledge of geology, geomorphology and hydrogeology typical of an area or region.

Land use mapping comes into play here as part of the data ? susceptibility mapping leading to hazard mapping leading to risk mapping. Involvement of local and state, if not federal governments can be of importance in the development of the database used for the risk analysis.